Polyvalent Metaphors in South-Central California Missionary Processes

Abstract

The Spanish missionary entrada (A.D. 1769 to 1833) along the California coast created a series of complex encounters between multiple cultural discourses. The Franciscan mission system directly brought colonial and indigenous cultural metaphorical understandings into play. Missionary and indigenous discourse interacted largely via the media of material culture, animals, embellished architecture, and landscape—media interpreted through preexisting cultural metaphors and understandings. Investigating how metaphors played a role in constituting colonial entanglements is important in understanding cultural interactions and change. Metaphors structured colonial interactions, simultaneously hindering and enabling missionary–indigenous relationships. These relationships created parameters for unforeseen transitory configurations: a process best theorized under the term polyvalence. By adopting polyvalence, the processes of colonialism can be approached without usage of ethnic or racialized terms such as creolization, hybridity, or amalgamation. In the case of indigenous south-central California, it is suggested here that widely different forms of evidence can be better appreciated without recourse to terms laden with racial or ethnic connotations. The evidence suggests that while missions may have failed to create entirely new ethnic groups, missionary endeavors did result in unanticipated outcomes, presenting problems and creative opportunities for indigenous groups living within immediate coastal and extended interior populations.

Expanding mission archaeology: A landscape approach to indigenous autonomy in colonial California

“…This approach explicitly underscores the complex nature of space as experienced by different actors (Robinson, 2013). Indeed, we envision these spatial zones not simply as representing immutable and dichotomous categories of native or colonizer, but rather as porous and often fleeting social spaces in which people of diverse backgrounds actively engaged in processes of accommodation and negotiation.…”

Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California

“…Second, occupational sequences at refuges might reflect reuse over long time spans, relatively short durations, or group coalescence punctuated by periodic dispersal. In the San Emigdio Mountains of South Central California, rockshelters served as "points of refuge" for Indians absconding from Santa Barbara Channel missions (Bernard 2008;Bernard et al 2014;Robinson 2013). This research offers important insights on Spanish missions and refuge, as well as on the nature of hinterland encounters with runaways seeking safe harbor among established interior groups.…”

“…Doled out as gifts to Indians and passed along far-reaching exchange networks, glass beads circulated widely throughout western North America (Arkush 1993; Hull 2009); yet at many places, including missions, glass beads coincide with marine shell beads continually produced by native bead makers (Panich 2014;Robinson 2013). North of San Francisco, clamshell bead manufacture actually accelerated throughout the LP2 (Milliken et al 2007:117).…”

Assemblage Theory and the Capacity to Value: An Archaeological Approach from Cache Cave, California, USA

“…Within indigenous terms, the objects in Crevice 1 may do more than simply symbolize the power of animals; they potentially retain a virtual capacity that the animals (or animal component parts) themselves held. These may have been amplified or altered in the alchemical polyvalent combination with other pieces of the assemblage (Robinson 2013c). The wearing of these objects by their human owner thus assembles various capacities in multi-complex relational manners that at once broadcasts the potential capacity that person may wield with that assemblage, while at the same time creating the character and status of the person wearing them.…”