Betwixt Sight and Hearing
This essay offers an historical investigation of the crossing of sensory cultures in the Iroquois missions of the seventeenth century in an attempt to assess the role that light played, as matter and as symbol, in the encounter between the Jesuits and the Iroquois. The analysis of the relations between vision and audition in these two cultures permits us to better understand the popularity of shiny materials in the missionizing context. While the Jesuits opposed word and image, the audible and the visible, the Iroquois saw vision as the equivalent of the voice. This equivalence was manifest in the use of shiny materials like, for example, shell bands (wampum) in the transmission of important speeches. The play of light on the surface of things subsumed the differences between sight and hearing for the Iroquois. It could be that this was the reason the missionaries privileged luminous décor in their apostolic activities among the Iroquois. Through creating interiors adorned with candles, wampum and textiles, the Jesuits sought to “convert” the Amerindians to their conception of a beyond that was immeasurably more luminous and life-giving than the glints of light off the surface of things. It remains that, for the Iroquois, these intermittent reflections were precious in themselves : such glimmers vitalized the social fabric, replenished forces, and distributed an inestimable bounty to the whole community.