Moving in time, out of step: mimesis as moral breakdown in European re-enactments of the North American Indian Woodland

What constitutes a dance step executed just right? Does its success reside in its faithfulness to an ‘original’ model or script or in a feeling experienced by the dancer interpreting the model in a new context? This is the kind of epistemological, and moral, dilemma that was often voiced during my fieldwork amongst Indianists, amateurs involved in re‐enactment of Native American lifeworlds on European soil. In Indianism, museum‐quality replicas made by and worn on European bodies function as heuristic tools in exploring ‘what life was really like’ in other times and places. Focusing on Woodland Indianist performances and replicas in a variety of European settings, I suggest that Indianism, as an amateur engagement with re‐imaginings and reifications of the North American Indian, faces constant moral breakdown because of its unease with the transformative nature of mimesis.

Voyage dans le temps à contre‐pied : la mimèsis en tant que décomposition morale dans les reconstitutions européennes de la vie des Indiens des Woodlands d'Amérique du Nord Résumé Qu'est‐ce qui fait qu'un pas de danse est exécuté juste comme il faut ? Est‐ce sa fidélité à un modèle « original », un script, ou bien la perception du danseur qui interprète ce modèle dans un nouveau contexte ? Ce type de dilemme épistémologique et moral a souvent été exprimé au cours de mon travail de terrain parmi des « indianistes », des amateurs qui reconstituent les mondes des Amérindiens sur le sol européen. Pour ces passionnés, des répliques de qualité muséographique, réalisées par et pour des corps européens, font office d'outils heuristiques pour explorer « ce qu’était vraiment la vie » en d'autres temps et d'autres lieux. En me concentrant sur les performances et les répliques des Indiens des Woodlands dans divers contextes européens, je suggère que l'indianisme, engagement amateur fait de réimagination et de réification des Indiens d'Amérique du Nord, est en constante décomposition morale parce qu'il a du mal à intégrer la nature transformative de la mimèsis.

Try not to be a scholar in your approach to the hobby. If we de‐mythologize everything, we may be good scholars, but what will remain of our hobby and of our dreams and ideals?

Gündel [21] : 41

This advice, offered by one of the protagonists in a collection of stories by East German Indianist and author Harald Gündel published in 1999, epitomizes a dilemma that is keenly felt amongst practitioners of ‘the hobby’. As amateurs who depend on museum collections and ethnohistorical works to nourish a knowledge‐intensive leisure pursuit, should they base their inquiries on scholarly standards and methods or continue to pursue alternative ways of gaining experience about the past in the present?

‘The hobby’, as it features in Gündel's stories and amongst groups of ‘hobbyists’ all over Europe, is short for ‘the Indian hobby’, or, in more scholarly‐sounding terminology embraced in particular by practitioners who wish to emphasize its heuristic aspects, ‘Indianism’. Indianism is an amateur engagement with re‐imaginings and reifications of a North American Indian ‘Other’ that involves crafting replicas of clothing and artefacts as well as re‐enactment of slices of Native American eighteenth‐ or nineteenth‐century life by Europeans dressed in home‐made Woodland or Plains Indian outfits. It is practised in many European countries in varying numbers and in sometimes rivalling, often transnational networks that differ in their approaches and ambitions.[1] Some privilege fun and sociability in the Indianist present, others emphasize the importance of dedicated study of remnants of Native American material culture, but all are interested in honing skills of replication.

In 2003 and 2004, I carried out multi‐sited fieldwork amongst Indianist groups and re‐enactors in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Czech Republic.[2] Additional encounters with Indianists in the United Kingdom took place in 2008‐10. My fieldwork experience amongst Indianists and re‐enactors interested in Native American lifeworlds, both at their homes and during events and gatherings, will provide the principal data for a conceptualization of Indianist replica‐making and re‐enactment as embodied practices with their own local traditions and dynamics. Taking my cue from Indianist performances and debates in which the correct way of practising comes under scrutiny, I will argue that Indianism is a mimetic practice steeped in moral questioning. The dilemma between scholarly approaches, on the one hand, and dreams and ideals, on the other, underlying Gündel's advice in the opening quotation plays out in mimetic situations. What constitutes a dance step executed just right? Does its success reside in its faithfulness to a thoroughly researched ‘original’ model or script or in a feeling experienced by the dancer interpreting the model in a new context? This is the kind of epistemological, and moral, dilemma that was often voiced during my fieldwork amongst Indianists. It was acted out in adopting a particular attitude in doing beadwork or in the manner of preparing (or failing to prepare) for a collective action, such as an opening ceremony at a large summer gathering or a fishing party using bow and arrow. Precisely because Indianism differs from ordinary life and yet is predicated on attempts to enact an elusive everyday, such attitudes and choices are negotiated constantly, causing friction and misunderstandings amongst practitioners (cf. Kalshoven [30] : chap. 3). In fact, Indianism is characterized by constant disagreements of a moral ilk. Discursively, these disagreements are expressed in different interpretations of what constitutes ‘authenticity’, which, as will become clear below, is all about getting things ‘right’.

In exploring Indianism as morally charged mimesis, I will make reference to an apt framework for the anthropological study of moralities proposed by Jarrett Ζigon ([52] ). Drawing on Heidegger's concept of ‘being‐in‐the‐world’, which he understands as an amalgam of personal and shared experience, Ζigon suggests that

morality can best be analytically thought of as those bodily dispositions enacted in the world non‐intentionally and unreflectively. To be moral is to inhabit a bodily disposition … that is familiar to oneself and most others with whom one comes into contact. It is in this familiar sharedness of morality that one can speak of the good, or more appropriately, being good (2007: 135).

Being‐in‐the‐world is a relational state that is always open to change as relationships are formed or modified, making it vulnerable to ‘breakdown’ when the unquestioned ‘ready‐to‐hand’ becomes the problematized ‘present‐to‐hand’ – as when a tool fails to function as expected. Ζigon calls upon anthropologists to pay attention to moments of moral breakdown that occur when an ‘unreflective mode of being‐in‐the‐world’ ([52] : 137) is ruptured and calls for a performance of ethics. I hope to show that in Indianism, predicated as it is on mimetic performance, moral breakdown is a state rather than an occurrence. In Indianist practice, an unreflective mode of being is the exception rather than the rule as practitioners constantly assess the quality of their performance, complicated further as a result of the nature and elusiveness of the model that they seek to recapture through replication. Moral breakdown is negotiated discursively through attempts at defining and redefining the authentic, making this concept a contested and morally charged one. Indianists are often called upon to explain their practice to a wider world in which they participate, their social world outside of Indianism, which tends to be bemused with Indianist bodily dispositions.[3] In this article, however, I will primarily focus on moral breakdown within the hobby, as Indianists reflect upon and disagree amongst themselves about what constitutes appropriate Indianist behaviour.

The Indianist practice of embodiment, of going through the motions of crafting and staging, of using the body as the locus of experience, resonates with a renewed scholarly interest in skilled human engagement with a world of ‘things’ from both a heuristic and an epistemological perspective.[4] Recent studies of historical re‐enactment and living history, practices that share many similarities with Indianism, ride the wave of the affective turn in a bid to arrive at a deeper understanding of what makes practitioners dress up and act out. Paying attention to emotion and affect as catalysts in performance, these studies cautiously, often implicitly, hint at their heuristic potential.[5] Emphasizing moments of slippage, uncertainty, and emotion, Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb ([1] ) conceive of re‐enactment as a performative tool in shaping settler and creole identities. Exploring the tensions between realism and affect, historians Iain McCalman and Paul Pickering ([36] ) present a collection of papers on historical re‐enactment, suggesting that its methodology merits serious attention. Anthropologist Mads Daugbjerg ([12] ) emphasizes the experiential potential of objects that enable American Civil War re‐enactors to ‘patchwork’ the past through a sensory process that relies heavily on touch. Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider, exploring historical re‐enactment as a performance of ‘remains’ in the present, distances herself from scholarly critiques of historical re‐enactment as privileging the ‘affective’ and ‘visceral’ rather than the ‘analytical’, which, she suggests, betrays an alliance to a Cartesian mind‐body dichotomy ([42] : 33‐9). Indianists engage in a self‐critique that is surprisingly similar to the scholarly critiques of re‐enactment criticized by Schneider. In my encounters with Indianists, they often expected me, as an anthropologist, to comment on the accuracy of their replicas and performances and were slightly disappointed that I had no such expertise on offer. Rather than attempting to assess the accuracy or effectiveness of Indianist re‐enactment, I wish to explore the self‐scrutiny that arises in Indianist preoccupations with ‘authentic’ mimesis as a morally charged project, while taking quite seriously its bodily and discursive expressions of interest in an elusive past.

Indianism is a strikingly embodied expression of a more general long‐standing European fascination with North American Indians.[6] Strolling around the camps that Indianists organize over the summer, where a few dozen, and in some cases even hundreds of, tepees are pitched in more or less bucolic surroundings, one is reminded of a film set or a living history theme park – only to find that the action proceeds without any cameras rolling or visitors watching. Such camps are usually private affairs accessible to members of dedicated clubs only – below, I will discuss examples of European stagings of Native American life‐in‐the‐past that are expressly aimed at a public and that are closely related to the broader scenes of historical re‐enactment and living history, where things tend to work somewhat differently.[7]

Indianist gatherings usually take place in the absence of ‘real Indians’, although some Indianist networks make a point of inviting Native guests to their summer camps, and individual Indianists may feel inspired or encouraged by Native Americans or members of First Nations with whom they are on friendly terms. From a scholarly perspective, the hobby has been criticized for fixing the admired role model in an immutable, nostalgically contemplated past.[8] Indianism is indeed steeped in longings for an otherness tainted with colonial associations that, perhaps ironically, are an object of inquiry and a matter of concern to practitioners.[9] First and foremost, however, they strive to become good or better at re‐experiencing material worlds from the past through replication. Indianism is a quest for knowledge that needs to be executed in methodologically correct ways. Indianists engage in practice‐based research studying original artefacts on display in museums, ethnographies of North American Indians, travel diaries, paintings and photographs, how‐to books, faraway landscapes, and role models that populate different temporalities and localities, including imaginary realms. Amongst these role models, an important, emotionally charged part is reserved for professional scholars of Native material cultures, in particular museum curators. Indianists are regular and critical customers of ethnology museums and strive for close‐up engagement with the artefacts they seek to emulate and use in action. They invest themselves bodily and imaginatively in the models they wish to recapture, while being, sometimes painfully, sometimes amusedly, aware of the ironies and compromises inherent in their mimetic practice. Their reasons for participating in the hobby are personal and varied. Usually, a childhood fascination with North American Indians awakened by films and children's books is mentioned as an initial motivation to learn more about their cultures. A strong interest in history and craft‐making tends to be key for pursuing the practice into adulthood. Importantly, the sheer availability of Indianist clubs and interest groups facilitates participation. Several discussion partners stressed that they might have become involved in medieval, Viking, or Roman living history had they happened to have met representatives of these scenes before becoming wrapped up in Indianist practice and sociality. Others, however, insist on their specific interest in and admiration of Native American cultures, often citing aesthetics and, albeit with some bashfulness, a sense of romanticism associated with Native American ‘closeness to nature’ or resistance to Western colonialism.

Invariably, the late nineteenth‐century German author Karl May is mentioned as having been instrumental in instilling a lasting image of the ‘noble Indian’ in European consciousness. Karl May is one of the reasons why a fascination with North American Indians tends to be associated with Germany in particular.[10] Centring on the friendship between an Apache chief (Winnetou) and a German writer (Old Shatterhand), May's stories have been made into films and widely translated, turning Karl May into a household name in several non‐German‐speaking countries as well. Many Indianists mention May's stories as an influence during childhood from which they have moved away on a quest to find out what things ‘really’ looked like in Native North America.

The Karl May trope that is triggered whenever Indianism comes up in conversation does not account for the hobby's performative aspects, which turn it into the salient practice that makes it stand out amongst other expressions of a fascination with Native Americans. The hobby's performative roots can be traced to the impression made by Lakotas featuring in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, which toured Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following Buffalo Bill's example, showmen such as Pawnee Bill and Dresden circus director Sarrasani hired Lakotas, to the delight of European audiences. According to several of my discussion partners, the first Indianists in Germany bought complete original outfits from Lakota performers, which they would subsequently wear, for example in carnival parades. When buying outfits became impractical, amateurs began fashioning their own costumes, with dedicated clubs emerging in the 1920s. Drawing inspiration from originals displayed in museums, they engaged in the dedicated craftwork, in particular beading and quilling, that is now central to Indianist exploration of Native American material cultures.

In my introduction, I have quite casually associated Indianism with mimesis, a concept that deserves to be put in context. In a study of the history of mimesis as a conditio humana, historical anthropologists Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf ([18] ) stress the omnipresence of mimetic practices in human society. Despite – or perhaps because of – its ubiquitousness, mimesis has always been considered somewhat of a problem in terms of its tenuous relationship with reality. In Platonic epistemology, mimesis was associated with doxa, opinion, rather than truth: ‘Doxa, in Plato's definition, deals with becoming instead of being, with the many instead of the one’ (Gebauer & Wulf [18] : 50). This aspect of mimesis became valued by later theorists such as Jacques Derrida, who claimed that ‘every beginning is actually a doubling’ (Gebauer & Wulf [18] : 294), a claim that Nelson Goodman took beyond the realm of textual critique into the world, emphasizing the creativity inherent in human action, always in reference to what came before: ‘Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking’ ([19] : 6). It is this potential for transformation that is considered key to mimesis and that makes it analytically interesting as a concept of inquiry in processes of change, as traditions are constantly taken up and shaped, either implicitly or explicitly, for present or future use.

Gebauer and Wulf are primarily concerned with mimesis in literary and artistic European contexts, as a play of texts and images making reference to one another, although they do acknowledge the importance of the body as the stage for mimetic performance, combining representative and expressive features (1995: 21, 266). The importance of repetitive bodily practices and gestures in safeguarding collective memory has been highlighted by Paul Connerton ([10] ). What he calls ‘ritual re‐enactment’ involves both inscriptive (textual) and incorporating (embodied) practices, with gestures playing an important rhetorical role in conveying a master narrative (Connerton [10] : 63‐71). In copying what came before, practitioners may draw on the power of previous role models. This latter point has been argued more forcefully by Michael Taussig in his study of colonial relationships in Mimesis and alterity ([48] ), inspired by Walter Benjamin's work on the mimetic faculty. Taussig insists that mimetic action as a form of empowering appropriation is central to human knowledge‐making. This perspective has been pursued in African ethnography highlighting mimetic appropriation of colonial power figures, with cases that resonate in interesting ways with Indianism. Paul Stoller ([47] ) approaches spirit possession amongst the Songhay in the Republic of Niger as a postcolonial embodied practice that lends power to practitioners as they engage in ludic mimicking of authoritative figures such as doctors, majors, or lawyers. Drawing on Taussig's ([48] ) emphasis on mimetic activity as a sensuous attempt at appropriating the power of an emulated model, Stoller suggests that for the Hauka, who ‘burlesque European colonial personages’ ([47] : 5), mimesis is ‘a way … of tapping into circuits of colonial and postcolonial power’ ([47] : 90).

Nicolas Argenti's ethnography of mimetic practices used both by ruling bodies and, in reaction to these, by subaltern groups in the Cameroon Grassfields provides a contemporary example that, again, foregrounds the transformative potential and power dynamics inherent in mimesis. He discusses ongoing intergenerational tensions and violence that are ludically expressed in masked dances, as a form of embodied social memory (Argenti [2] , [3] ).[11] Describing the dance practice of young performers predicated on images of the national gendarmerie that oppresses them, he argues that their dancing, rather than implying admiration or constituting an attempt at emulation, can be seen as subversive ‘because new images arise out of the embodiment of the primary images of state power and violence … The ultimate aim of mimetic activity is paradoxically the transformation of the object of mimesis’ (Argenti [2] : 774). Argenti brings out the ambivalence of mimesis as a hovering in‐between various states and times, informing the present while transforming the past.

The mimetic action described by Stoller and Argenti does not depend on careful copying of the attire of their models of emulation. The Hauka improvise guns, whips, and uniforms out of materials they happen to have handy (Stoller [47] : 123‐4). In fact, maintaining a measure of difference between the model of emulation and the person engaging in mimesis seems to be key to a successful performance (Stoller [47] : 194). The body as a stage that produces similarity as well as transformation features as a theme in a rather different ethnographic context also, that of hunting. Rane Willerslev ([50] ) discusses a community of Siberian hunters, the Yukaghir, who engage in mimetic behaviour in an attempt to get closer to their prey animal. They may approach the animal while hiding under a skin and making animal‐like movements, but Yukaghir mimesis is never an attempt at realism: mimesis, Willerslev insists, is always about difference as well as similarity.[12] Elaborating on Taussig's and Benjamin's exploration of the concept, he suggests that mimesis is a mode of being that accommodates both self‐involvedness and world‐involvedness. It is this dual movement combined with the themes of transformation and power that interests me here as it can be fruitfully applied to the Indianist case. In Indianism, the model to be captured through replication is not a prey animal but a figure removed in space and time – a moving target that may be approached by way of its material culture, documented as still life in museum spaces. Capturing the elusive North American Indian requires involvement with a world ‘out there’, in the past, that is mimicked by playing up similarities. But as the opening quotation from Gündel suggests, it also involves dreams and ideals of a very personal nature grounded and expressed in European mythologizing that underlines the difference between the ‘original’ model and the person engaging in its mimesis. In mimicking idealized versions of the elusive historical model, the resulting replication becomes even further removed from the ‘original’ thing, resulting in a transformation that is closer to the ‘self’.

Compared to the African case studies discussed above, in Indianism, roles are reversed, with descendants of ‘colonials’ mimicking the Native American ‘subaltern’ – yet something powerfully inspiring is discerned in the model which is mobilized and transformed through mimesis by combining self‐involvedness and world‐involvedness. Mimetic transformation in Indianism takes place both at the level of replication and at the level of the self: in replicating objects and in using replicas in re‐enactment, Indianists practise gestures that get sedimented in the body over time. It is through these gestures and replicas that role models’ expertly imagined lives are meant to be captured and re‐experienced. Transformation, however, is closely policed in Indianism, as it threatens the desire to produce something ‘authentic’ that does justice to a revered role model, in marked contrast with the African examples. The ideal is to produce work that fits a specific style without constituting a straightforward copy. The latter is frowned upon for two reasons: it might infringe upon intellectual property rights of the Native individual or family who owned the design, and it shows a lack of easy mastery and pattern recognition achieved through years of practice. Mimesis on the level of the artefact is a matter of expert emulation: by incorporating the appropriate gestures, the craftworker becomes able to add new, original, specimens to the style rather than replicate it. Self‐involvedness and (past‐)world‐involvedness thus become tightly interwoven in the replica. Similarity with the emulated original is important in terms of style, and yet the replica itself is ideally a unique, different, highly personal artefact in which an Indianist takes pride as it enhances his or her prestige in the hobby if recognized by established Indianist experts as being faithful to a specific style, as an artefact that could have existed in the period of emulation. This policing occurs at get‐togethers where individuals show off new artefacts that are commented upon by well‐established bead or quill workers, but also in on‐line fora where Indianists exchange patterns and ideas.

A masterfully executed piece is appreciatively called a ‘museum‐quality replica’, synonymous with ‘authentic replica’; importantly, in Indianist usage, authenticity is an attribute of the reproduction, not of the emulated past (Fig. [NaN] ). When used in the present, the authentic replica allows the Indianist to become involved in the past world of emulation.

Gebauer and Wulf highlight the political aspects implied in mimesis – those who have the means to present certain representations, such as state representatives, have the means to influence public perception. Within Indianism, proper mimesis confers prestige. What constitutes proper mimesis, however, is constantly debated. To what extent Indianists are expected to strive for museum quality and to produce authentic replicas depends on the nature of peer pressure in their Indianist entourage. In some circles, heartfelt interest is considered more important than an outstanding piece of beadwork; in others it is rigour that carries the day. In other words, Indianists operate on a spectrum in‐between self‐involvedness and world‐involvedness, but in all cases, knowledge of the original models, materials, and patterns and the social worlds in which they used to be embedded is expected and appreciated, and must be evident in the replicas they produce. Every Indianist whom I met rejected craftwork based on ‘mere fantasy’ – that is, not grounded in any solid knowledge of and engagement with the original styles displayed in museums – regarding this as evidence either of laziness or of disrespect vis‐à‐vis the emulated model.

Indianists use their bodies as exploratory tools, both in craftwork and in collective performances. These performances need not be fully scripted, allowing for scenarios to play out differently than in the models Indianists seek to emulate (cf. Daugbjerg [12] on ‘revising’ episodes from the past). At times, Indianists will fill in gaps in the historical or material record as the action unfolds both physically and imaginatively. Examples include executing a choreography on the basis of different sets of observations made at the time that allow for a partial reconstruction; experimentation with obscure techniques such as the use of bird quills in decorative embroidery with a view to finding out how to achieve results evident in museum pieces; or organizing a raid resulting in casualties who may be called upon to participate in a victory dance the next day. This last example brings out the ironies that are rife in this practice, of which participants are acutely aware. And yet Indianists insist on dressing up and acting out in an attempt to experience what a Native American might have experienced in another time elsewhere. Mimesis as transformative practice is integral to Indianism while threatening its very purpose – with moral breakdown looming constantly, as bodily dispositions are never straightforward. This is a serious and morally charged project predicated on acts of imaginative and experimental transformation that shares anthropology's commitment to making the unfamiliar and familiar commensurate.[13]

The Lakotas performing with Buffalo Bill and other, European, entrepreneurs contributed to the predominance of the Plains Indian as the quintessential North American Indian in the European imagination. A large majority of European Indianists centre their efforts of imitative engagement on Plains Indian tribes, Lakota in particular. In some of the larger camps, however, a few longhouses are usually pitched among the tepees. In fact, quite a few clubs in different European countries are dedicated to studying and enacting Eastern Woodland rather than Plains cultures, in particular the Six Nations of the Iroquois League. Several of my discussion partners mentioned Woodland Indianism as a niche steadily gaining in popularity as part of a drive towards variety, reflecting more accurately the real situation in Indian country. Indianists will often say that they have a duty in educating the public about Native American (past) realities, in a bid to fight clichés. Performing Woodland instead of Plains Indian cultures is in itself part of a trend in the hobby to move away from the ‘stereotypical’. My ethnographic examples below will concern this minority of Indianists who choose to act out eighteenth‐century Woodland lifeworlds. Presenting this particular slice out of my multi‐sited ethnographic evidence will bring into even starker relief the constant self‐scrutiny involved in a practice that is predicated upon emulation of a particular historical model. The relatively marginal position of Woodland Indianists in the hobby forces them to explain and justify their practice more forcefully, and to maintain closer contacts with one another, than is the case amongst the more established Plains Indianists. This does not mean that Woodland Indianism does not, in many ways, constitute an arbitrary and fractured site running the risk of being reified and subjected to all too schematized theorizing in my present approach (cf. Candea [8] ) – many other slices of salient life experience speaking to issues of morality and mimesis may be defined within the transnational subset of Indianism. However, in making a deliberate choice to engage with the moral economy of Woodland Indianist voices, mimesis, and objects in a variety of European settings, I intend to carve out an analytically useful and ethnographically arresting site within a multi‐sited context that is bounded, held together, and threatened by mimetic practice.

At the so‐called ‘Indian Week’, the annual Indianist summer gathering in eastern Germany, one day is set aside as Waldlandtag, Woodland Day. Members of Woodland tribes perform songs and dances and share their food with Plains Indianists at what is considered a highlight at the Week (Fig. [NaN] ). I was told, however, that having Woodland hobbyists in a largely Plains‐orientated camp had been a source of controversy amongst Indianists, as it could not be construed as being based on a historical model – thus failing to be ‘authentic’ in the sense of ‘historically correct’. Indianists borrow this latter term from the battle re‐enactment and living history scenes, practised by dedicated amateurs as well as by professionals in the heritage industry who go to great lengths to ensure that the right kind of cloth is used to fashion a Confederate jacket or that the food cooked at a medieval feast contains nothing but the ingredients available at the emulated time and place. An increasing number of Indianists are inspired by re‐enactors’ and living historians’ rigorous approach – Woodland Indianists in particular, because some re‐enactment groups include Woodland scouts. Being accurate in one's outfit, careful not to mix styles that could never have existed together, and knowledgeable about one's tribe of interest, I was told, was important for a worthwhile and heartfelt Indianist experience. But it was just as important, many eastern German discussion partners would stress, to be social and inclusive. Having Woodland Indianists in a Plains setting was a compromise that they had decided to accept and that had become a source of teasing and banter.[14]

One of the men dancing on Woodland Day invited me to his house near Berlin to discuss his interest in both historical and contemporary aspects of Mohawk culture. Dieter,[15] trained as a PE teacher and working for the local Social Services, emphasized the importance of contact with ‘real’ Indians. His club used to send Czech beads to Mohawk contacts in Kahnawake and Akwesasne, and he later met members of a Mohawk delegation to Berlin. One of these encouraged him not to copy artefacts, but to re‐experience their meaning through a process of adaptation. He therefore associated an appropriate Indianist attitude with feeling rather than with museum quality or historical correctness. By way of an example, Dieter explained that executing a dance step that would be ‘wrong’ by the book but that felt ‘right’ when dancing could be considered quite appropriate because it might enhance the ideal of re‐experiencing the past in achieving a connection with a Mohawk lifeworld in an experiential manner, through attunement to one's own environment. It was especially exciting, he mentioned, that Indianists interested in Iroquois culture and ‘real’ Iroquois in North America seemed to be engaged in a simultaneous rediscovery of traditional elements of Iroquois culture, both groups aiming to bring these back to life.[16]

In Dieter's club, however, a member studying anthropology (Ethnologie) at university had introduced a new policy of strict copying of artefacts, instead of adaptation – with the exception of sacred ceremonial objects, which should be left alone altogether. This new approach, Dieter explained, was hard to take for Indianists who sought to invest the hobby with feeling rather than turning their experience into a ‘theatre play’. The hobby should be ‘life, not a festival’, he stressed.

Dieter's approach to the hobby as something that needed to be filled with life‐in‐the‐present (in other words, with self‐involvedness) was echoed by fellow Mohawk Indianist Helmut, considered one of the best singers in the eastern German Indianist scene. I had heard his impressive baritone accompanied by a rattle both at the Indian Week and at smaller Indianist gatherings. Sometimes he would sing folk songs from the Erzgebirge, the mountainous region situated between the Czech border and the towns of Chemnitz and Dresden where some of his best Indianist friends had their roots. Singing other than Native American songs at the Week, however, was no longer appreciated because of the increasingly strict rules privileging the historically correct. Helmut was not happy with this new trend; life needed to be lived now, not in some imaginary past. Indians in North America, he insisted, would not impose such rules on their lives either. Helmut emphasized the importance of adapting elements of Iroquois culture to Indianists’ own circumstances in order to turn Indianism into what he considered a meaningful experience in the here‐and‐now. Some patterns from German traditional crafts showed affinity with Iroquois patterns, enabling a link with local roots. Helmut was a carpenter by training and enjoyed using his skills in the hobby; in his club, he was the expert on both music and wood carving.

Browsing through club archives, Helmut showed me photographs of a 1987 visit by the First Nation curator at the Oneida Museum, who had expressed admiration for the accuracy of the artefacts made by club members. Helmut still beamed with pleasure at the compliment. Delivered by a museum curator and a Native, two role models embodied by one man, it had made a lasting impression. Knowledge of material culture recognized by a specialist, then, was very important to Helmut's attitude to Indianist practice, but straightforward copying of museum originals or pointing out the use of ‘wrong’ beads in a hobbyist design missed the point of the ideal of re‐experiencing. Authenticity, Helmut said, is just a nonsense term for those who have no imagination.

Reflecting on the future of Indianism, Helmut expected it to become more sterile as an increasing number of young hobbyists were seen to take up anthropology as a formal academic study. He agreed with the statement in Gündel's book: a scholarly attitude would take away the fun of creating one's own space in the hobby by connecting the past world to the Indianist self. Academics want to know what things were really like, Helmut said, but it remained conjecture as they hadn't been there themselves either. Implying that academics interested in material culture were looking for static facts, he emphasized that exchange and adaptation to new circumstances had always been a human given, making a search for the ‘real thing’ fruitless. Both Dieter and Helmut emphasized the importance of ‘self’, and thus of difference vis‐à‐vis the emulated model, in their mimetic involvement. At the same time, this difference was considered a normal effect of ongoing change, which Helmut suggested was applicable to people in the past as well. Thus, in emphasizing difference, they brought out similarity as well.

The misgivings expressed by Dieter and Helmut reflect a major disagreement amongst Indianists, which centres on the question of whether their re‐enactments of Native American lifeworlds from the past should emphasize similarity in reflecting the historical model (which they associated with a scholarly approach) in such a way as to achieve a historically correct result, or whether the lifeworlds enacted in the hobby should reflect the Indianists’ own contemporary European lifeworld. Participants regard both modes as ways of learning about the past, in addition to providing satisfying experiences in the present, but they situate their practice, and how it should resonate, differently in terms of self‐ versus (past‐)world‐involvement. As this dilemma is constantly reflected upon, Woodland action is self‐conscious, lacking the bodily dispositions that should go without saying in agreeing what constitutes good practice (cf. Ζigon [52] ).

Indianism is acted out on ‘selves’ who aim to resemble others from the past. Several Woodland Indianists in eastern Germany (the GDR) told me that they felt ‘better men’ while in outfit, which they associated with their admiration for the League of Six Nations – the Iroquois seemed to have been successful at building a kind of egalitarian society that the GDR had not quite been able to emulate.[17] More generally, Indianists tend to emphasize that Indianism offers a zone for interaction where people from very different backgrounds come together who would not meet on equal terms in their everyday professional lives – which is thought to reflect a more egalitarian way of life amongst eighteenth‐ or nineteenth‐century Native Americans. Some of my Woodland discussion partners, however, expressed discomfort about displaying other people's heritage on their very body and looked actively for solutions to make discrepant categories fit by imagining the other world to be contiguous with the self.

Amongst these was a Dutch teaching assistant, Pieter, who had recently become interested in Mohawk culture by reading about the intensive historical contacts between Dutch traders and Mohawk warriors and trappers during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pieter did not consider himself an Indianist, but rather a historical re‐enactor – he participated in events aimed at a public as a member of different Dutch re‐enactment groups, mostly focusing on the Middle Ages, and was respected for his knowledge of the medieval longbow. Pieter regularly travelled to international events in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and England, and was working to complete a Mohawk outfit that would allow him to participate fully in re‐enactments of skirmishes.

Pieter felt that the only way in which he could explain his role in a historically and ethnically correct manner and justify donning a Mohawk outfit was by incarnating a seventeenth‐century Dutchman who had emigrated to North America and, as a trapper, had adopted Mohawk clothing and life‐ways – a historical figure who had successfully engaged in imitating ethnic ‘others’ during the period of emulation. When I met him in his Dutch hometown, which used to be one of the main seaports from which ships departed for the New World, Pieter talked me through the materials that he had used for his not quite finished trapper's outfit. He had chosen to work with wool and linen exclusively, in attractive colours, as he imagined that North American Indians, with their penchant for aesthetically pleasing things, would have speedily incorporated textiles. Moreover, a Dutch trapper might have preferred textiles anyway, even though leather leggings would have been more practical in the woods. Pieter had already bought buckskin to make moccasins. The linen used for his breech cloth, he pointed out, had been coloured with chemical dyes, but of a kind that would appropriately fade. The original trade cloth that was still produced in England was outrageously expensive. Even though linen could be found easily, it tended to be very pricey. Whenever he happened upon a good batch at reasonable cost, he would buy all of it at once, confident that he would be able to redistribute the find amongst his re‐enactor friends.

As an important source of information for the outfit he sought to produce, Pieter mentioned, in particular, English paintings of soldiers in North America who had their portraits taken in Native American dress. He cautioned that they might wear a mix of clothes of varying provenance and that their beadwork might be too elaborate to be representative of the decoration common on trapper outfits. More tantalizingly, he knew that the Army Museum in the Dutch city of Delft owned an early eighteenth‐century costume displayed with the breeches half hidden inside the coat. According to the museum, the costume was too fragile to be pried apart, much to Pieter's frustration – not able to see the full piece, he remained in the dark about parts of its manufacture and thus about the best way to reproduce it. For this was his goal: to fashion and wear garments that reflected as faithfully as possible an outfit that had been worn by a historical figure he could identify with, in a quest to be true to himself and his roots and to the historical period he sought to stage. In fact, Pieter was critical of a lack of historically correct rigour amongst German Woodland Indianists he had met, considering them prone to idealizing the historical model and intent on socializing rather than on doing proper research.

As will have become clear by now, Indianist imaginings and re‐imaginings of North American Indians are to a large extent mediated and reified through things and materials displayed in museum contexts – Indianist experimentation with and emulation of these things and materials allows them to reflect on and, in some cases, contribute to exhibitions. Many of the Indianists and re‐enactors whom I met expressed a mixture of delight and frustration with museum displays, often mentioning that they had spotted factual mistakes and pointed these out to curators, who then failed to take appropriate action. But there were stories of collaboration between hobbyists and museum professionals as well.

In England, I met a living historian particularly interested in Creek and Cherokee Woodland cultures who arranged for us to visit the stores of Derby Museum. Alex, a dry‐stone waller and overseer of the grounds of a large country estate, had contributed to several exhibitions at the museum, one of which had been on the French and Indian Wars. He had lent out replicas for visitors to handle and had given talks. On excellent terms with the curator, Alex engaged him in a lively conversation on Native American beaded artefacts, their provenance, and their possibilities for display. We visited two other local museums on the same day – Alex told me that his interest in Native American history had triggered an interest in British local history. His focus was on historical perspectives on rural, everyday life. One of his projects had been a reconstruction, on the basis of old diaries, of the diet, tools, and clothing of a man who had lived in a neighbouring village.

My visit to Derby had been timed to coincide with an event at the American Museum in Bath, where Alex would perform as an Iroquois scout in a skirmish set in 1758 Ticonderoga (now in New York State), organized by living history association New France and Old England. Alex's fellow scout Toby explained that he represented an adopted Catholic Mohawk from Kahnawake. Toby's entire family had been taken prisoner by the Abenaki, but he was the only one traded to the Mohawk. A tall lean man sporting impressive face paint, he carried an unadorned but beautifully smooth ball‐headed war club carved by Alex out of maple wood: even the tree had been chosen just right, he marvelled, expressing admiration for his friend's craftwork. When I asked them whether they learned skills from one another, they told me it was more important to have ‘trading skills’. Toby had fashioned the waistcoat and breeches that John wore in Bath. He had made three shirts from striped linen in one go for the three of them. John had reciprocated with a scrimshawed powderhorn,[18] Alex with the war club. Alex had made John a quillwork bag to trade for a powderhorn. John praised Alex's flair for quilling; his work looked as if it had been made using bad lighting, like the original stuff, not too tidy.

In my fieldwork amongst continental Indianists, ‘authenticity’ had shown itself to be a bone of contention, for example in terms of the materials used in replica‐making. When I asked Alex whether he resorted to compromise using English deer hides for his replicas, he answered that for him, as a non‐Indian, local materials were actually more authentic. Drawing exclusively on American source materials, he felt, would be contrived. An example he found quite amusing concerned the use of mink in one of his artefacts, from an animal trapped along the river near his village. Mink was introduced into Britain from North America, he explained, so, ironically, he used local mink that originated in the place of emulation. Alex expressed a particular interest in people and materials of different provenance crossing paths on the way to exchange. During the Contact period, he suggested, Native people adopted things that were alien to them and subsequently turned them into something ‘completely Indian’. A splendid, beaded Creek‐Seminole bandolier bag lined with Chinese silk that we had admired at Derby Museum, he reminded me, was entirely composed of trade goods.

In the examples of Woodland Indianist practice discussed above, two approaches of moving in time, by experiencing the past in the present, came to the fore, one intent on the historical model, the other stressing the importance of adaptation in the present – always played out through the making and using of more or less historically correct replicas. Indianist mimetic engagement fluctuates on a spectrum in‐between self‐involvedness and (past)world‐involvedness, as I showed, varying on Willerslev's ([50] ) conceptualization of mimesis. Participants may run through a scenario based on a previous historical model with the aim of getting it right next time, or they may attend to the experience in the present with the aim of making it feel right, here and now, in a deliberate move away from the model of emulation. ‘Getting the steps right’ allows for two different interpretations, which imply a different stance towards ‘past presencing’ (Macdonald [37] ) and towards what constitutes the ‘authentic’ way of proceeding in the hobby. In all cases, the professed goal of finding out about ‘other’, Native American realities (through [past‐]world‐involved mimesis) goes at least to some extent hand in hand with taking pleasure in a worthwhile experience catering to the self (through self‐involved mimesis) – the Woodland was seen to be made to resonate with GDR ideals and German craft traditions as well as with Dutch and English histories of exchange and hybridity. Many of my Woodland discussion partners suggested that such resonance enhanced the authenticity of the experience. ‘Authenticity’ was wielded as a means to justify one's stance in the hobby, but the semantic load of the term varied from the material (as in an authentic, museum‐quality replica) to the experiential (as in a dance step that ‘felt’ right).[19]

As more ‘scholarly’ methods are introduced into Indianist practice and as ‘historically correct’ approaches are increasingly adopted from the living history and battle re‐enactment scenes, however, the risk of moral breakdown, already a given in Indianism as a practice that can never quite amount to an ‘unthought’ everyday, looms larger as Indianists question the balance between self‐ and world‐involved mimesis. All too frequently, moving out of step with prevalent views on appropriate mimesis in one's club or network leads to a moment of breakdown which in turn may lead to schisms, or to reassessments of what it is to be authentic. Already problematized as such because of its mimetic character, Indianist practice is further complicated by the incongruities of dressed‐up bodies performing temporally and geographically removed ‘others’ in postcolonial entanglements. Indianists themselves are not fully reconciled to the dressing‐up part of their practice, which is evident both in embarrassment about the show and circus roots of their hobby and in attempts at reconciling Indianist practice with European selves – in a constant discursive and performative balancing act of mimesis's inward‐ and outward‐moving forces. Awareness of postcolonial entanglements and ironies feeds a professed emphasis on a self reaching out to an other in a show of similarity as opposed to allegedly superficial ‘mimicking’ of a decidedly ‘other’ material culture. The right way of practising Indianism is contested and impure, caught up in anxieties about what constitutes proper, ‘authentic’ mimesis.

Ζigon suggests that when the unreflective mode of being‐in‐the‐world is questioned at moments of moral breakdown, and the subject feels uncomfortably conscious of the ‘present‐to‐hand’, ethical reflection takes place as ‘a process of once again returning to the unreflective mode of everyday moral dispositions’ ([52] : 138). In a recent contribution to the broader debate in the anthropology of ethics on the question of whether such ethical reflection is pervasive or exceptional in human action, Michael Lempert ([34] ) draws attention to its episodic, interactional, and performative character. I have argued that, in Indianist mimesis, the performance of ethics constitutes an ongoing rather than exceptional or episodic problem as practitioners constantly look to balance self‐involvedness and world‐involvedness by policing or justifying the extent of transformation that takes place, an element integral to mimesis. Indianist mimesis, itself predicated on transformative performance, thus incorporates an ongoing, and quite literally interactional, performance of ethics. In spite of their emphasis on performance and embodiment as heuristic devices, many of my Woodland Indianist discussion partners gave voice to the importance of a ‘heartfelt’ engagement, in which ‘inner’ motives were considered superior to ‘surface’ gestures or expert things. Inward‐ and outward‐moving instances of mimesis were negotiated discursively through the notion of ‘authenticity’. Authentic representation was often understood to imply an authentic experience of re‐enactment, rather than referring to the authenticity of the re‐enactment as such in its performed materiality. Acknowledgement of the hybrid nature of material culture, as we saw, was also invoked to dissolve tension between self‐involved and world‐involved mimesis. And yet, perhaps ironically, it is in the continued practising of skilled gestures resulting in incorporation (cf. Connerton [10] ) that moral breakdown may be averted: I suggest that it is during the process of expert replica‐making that Indianists, over a period of many years of practising, can achieve a mimetic mastery that does allow materials and tools to become ready‐to‐hand rather than present‐to‐hand – as in everyday, unthought experience. Such work is transformative of both the object and the self since ‘[m]imesis is a complex, multifaceted process of re‐presentation and re‐creation, in the course of which new works come into being via the misconstruction and transformation of a model’ (Gebauer & Wulf [18] : 90). And yet practitioners routinely risk moral breakdown as they insist on staying closer to a scholarly role model than might be in their own epistemological interest – a scholarly role model that is, ironically, an imagined one, increasingly of another time.

As noted above, for Argenti, ‘The ultimate aim of mimetic activity is paradoxically the transformation of the object of mimesis’ ([2] : 774). This is indeed the aim of some Indianists, but for others, it is something that they struggle to resist.

Graph: Replica created by living historian David Spencer, 2008. (Photograph by the author.)

Graph: Woodland Day, Indian Week 2003. (Photograph by the author.)