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Reviews of Books
| Sensory Worlds in Early America. By Peter Charles Hoffer. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. x, 334. $39.95.)
Reviewed by Richard Cullen Rath
, University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Peter Charles Hoffer has set out to do no less than "make the past live again" (p. 253) by recovering the sensory experiences of early Americans. He contends that "the report of the senses was of immense importance to the people who lived in early America" (p. viii) and that sensation and perception were causal forces with which historians need to deal. French social historians called for such histories decades ago, but only within the past few years has that call been heeded. Recently, a number of historians, including myself, have focused on one sense or another. Hoffer is the first to treat all the senses together, a distinction that is both a strength and a weakness of the book. Its strength is in its scope and complexity. The senses are experienced holistically, not one at a time, and considering them that way is a difficult but interesting task. |
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Hoffer sets out his case in a series of four interrelated essays. The first explores the mutual misperceptions between the English and Indians during their initial encounters and argues that the differing sensory regimes caused bloody conflicts. The English grappled with the new sensations they met by forcing them to fit in old categories of perception. This along with the imposition of an English topography on Indian land Hoffer dubs "sensory imperialism" (p. 49), an imperialism that ultimately routed the Indians' sensory world. Hoffer draws from contemporary native American literary sources, traditional accounts, and suppositions about the orality of all Indian cultures to construct a version of their sensory practices that emphasized the spiritual powers of the Europeans they encountered. This creative reconstruction sometimes veers toward stereotyping, as when Hoffer discusses sensory attributes of "the native mind" (p. 35), though, to be fair, he does the same for the English. |
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The second essay considers the invisible world that Hoffer claims was nonetheless perceived in New England in the seventeenth century. A series of sensory crises led up to the Salem witchcraft trials, resulting in the relegation of the invisible to the periphery of American sensory worlds in the wake of the trials. In the half-century before the trials, Puritans continually searched for God's providence, which they found, according to Hoffer, in a series of Indian wars. God's invisible hand brought them victory over the Pequots in a bloody massacre, justified by constructing the enemy as minions of Satan. In contrast, King Philip's war "overwhelmed the Puritans' senses" (p. 97) and seemed a test of faith and a punishment, with the devil set loose on the land. Captivity tales turned the world upside down and transformed the invisible world from heaven to inscrutable wilderness. Giving credence to spectral evidence and hearsay, Puritan leaders sensed a world of malignant spirits in their midst in the fits and accusations that beset Salem in 1692. Only after two dozen executions and deaths did the tide turn against these sightings of the invisible world, but it did so decisively, replacing the apparitional with a more sober outlook on the sensor y world distinguished by "a more experimental, empirical view of perception and the senses" (p. 131). |
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