Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures [Unknown Binding]

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• ISBN-10: 0585272417
• ISBN-13: 978-0585272412
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultur, January 4, 2002

By 

D. Frazier (United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Studies in the Anthropology of North Ame) (Paperback)

Gleach does a wonderful job of presenting both worlds while maintaining an objective outlook. I have truely enjoyed reading this selection based on that alone. Gleach manages to keep you informed of the details yet helps you to gain new prospective on the view of both cultures. He not only tries to make sense of what happened in the contact period but does a good job of making you understand why it happened the way it did. Not your average Native American/ Colonial Conflict documentary. A wonderful job of teaching the Native side that you never learned in school. Blaming neither side for the outcome Gleach will make hard work of any other writer pulling off one as good.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A model of how to do culture(-contact) history, January 20, 2006

By 

Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Studies in the Anthropology of North Ame) (Paperback)

In this book, Gleach (Cornell University), who was a consultant on Terrence Malick's new movie "The New World," provides a wise, interesting, and readable analysis of the much-fabled Native American-English encounter in what became Virginia. AMong other things, his analysis makes sense of an incident that most everyone has heard of and many (not least the Disney studio) have sentimentalized: Pocahontas's intervention to save Captain John Smith in 1608.

What Gleach does convincingly in this book is to draw on his extensive knowledge of Algonquian(-language-speaking) peoples to interpret the scant records of Powhatan culture and cultural assumptions. To understand Powhatan reactions to the English immigrants, we need to put aside our knowledge of who won in the long run. It was far from obvious to the Powhatan that they were going to be subordinated by aliens who were barely surviving. An earlier attempt to establish a Spanish colony had failed. The Powhatan sought to incorporate the English within their society (the one to which the English had immigrated), though none of the English ever seemed to conceive that "heathen inferiors" believed that they could and should make the rules for uninvited and unruly immigrants to the Powhatan homeland.

The English view prevailed, and colonial history has been written from the viewpoint of the winners. As Marshall Sahlins has done for the native Hawaiians' understanding of Captain Cook's incursions, Gleach has recovered a plausible picture of "how natives think" (the title of Sahlins's second book about initial English-Hawaiian contacts). In addition to showing the rationality within their own understandings of the world and proper human interaction of how the Powhatan tried to educate (literally reform) those who thrust into the Powhatan world by drawing on studies of other Algonquian cultures, Gleach also draws on extensive knowledge of English culture ca. 1600 when the Church of England was relatively new and in the English view recently legitimated by the defeat of the Catholic would-be invaders.

3 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fred Gleach, June 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Studies in the Anthropology of North Ame) (Paperback)

Fred Gleach's piece is both acute and aggresive. Fered Gleach writes this book like only Fred Gleach can. This means a lot. Not everyone can live up to their potential. Fred Gleach lives up to his potential here. I tell you- this is Fred Gleach writing from Fred Gleach's heart. This means a lot. Some of us write, and it is not from the heart, or it is to get tenure. But Fred Gleach here writes this book like only Fred Gleach can. Some things, like the truth, is important. This Fred Gleach's message. This book is very Gleachian. This means a lot.

Buy it.