1899:44).
In cases that contemporary diaries record, the imitated content seems generally to have been derived from the bodily actions of Europeans and frequently their words. Such mimesis is not mere action learning, it is also results oriented. To note mimesis as imitative instruction is to depart from Darwin’s framing of Fuegians’ skill as comparable “to the instinct of animals,” as “not improved by experience” and as static (“their most ingenious work … has remained the same, for the last 250 years” [1989:178]). What would Darwin have said if he had spent time closely engaged with people, trying to modify their tree-chopping technique with a new tool? Would he have conceded a greater comparability of them with himself in respect to the improvement of their technique by experience?
Our consideration of humor can begin with West’s ([1852]1966:88) report on imitative ability as a general capacity of the natives of Tasmania: “They were fond of imitation and humour; they had their drolls and mountebanks; they were able to seize the peculiarities of individuals and exhibit them with considerable force.” The link that is made between imitation and humor is important, relatable to the extent to which good humor, drollery, and expressions of exuberance seem to have been a regular feature of some early encounters that remained of a relatively positive kind. (Many encounters did not remain so.) Playfulness did not escape Darwin’s notice. We learn from him that indigenous people appreciated capacities of Europeans to imitate: members of the Beagle’s crew in Tierra del Fuego were apparently not averse to engaging in antics and imitative behavior, we are told; although imitative of what and whether it was of the indigenes we do not learn. The Fuegians “were highly pleased by the antics of a man belonging to the boat’s crew, who danced well and was a good mimic” (in Keynes 1979:96).
Antics appear to have been most notable when visitors played with children, when opportunity arose. Gaiety and forwardness of children are mentioned on a number of occasions by Baudin. After a short time, the children behaved “as if we had known them a long time,” as if the visitors were old acquaintances. The children seem to have accommodated to the difference that the outsiders originally represented and were carrying on as usual. At least for the children, French reassurance enabled a restoration of affect as usual. And the French were able to play and engage in antics with them in a way they would not easily have done with adults.
Playfulness, antics—these seem to be exercises in bridge building. Darwin instinctively treated reproduced language in these encounters as something that is not first and foremost propositional but something uttered and taken up, a form of engagement. Similar forms of bridge building, the intent to produce shared feeling, can be seen in Darwin’s observation that Fuegians expressed: “satisfaction or good will by rubbing or patting their own, and then our bodies” (in Keynes 1979:96).
Darwin implies that they are, in effect, suggesting an affective meaning content: satisfaction is shown by their rubbing their stomachs. They then do this to the outsiders, in the absence of the latter imitating the original gesture. The intent seems clear: to establish a mutuality of experience and feeling. Rubbing and patting (so Darwin suggests) were iconic of good feeling and satisfaction. (Presumably, all were smiling or seemed amiable in other ways during this exchange.) Darwin also notes the importance of reciprocity when he writes of having accompanied an old Fuegian man, who offered him evidence of friendly intent by “three hard slaps, which were given me on the breast and back at the same time”; and who then “bared his bosom for me to return the compliment, which being done, he seemed highly pleased” (Darwin 1896:205).
Imitation could turn into parody. George Mortimer (in Roth 1899:41) gives the following account of an interview in order to make the point that French discoverers often found it difficult to open communication with the natives: “Our third mate on landing, saw several of them [natives] moving off. He approached them alone and unarmed, making every sign of friendship his fancy could suggest; but though they mimicked his actions exactly, and laughed heartily, he could not prevail upon them to stay.” Thus, imitation was not always a means of achieving greater contact with the other (by “becoming and behaving” like him). It could be a way of achieving some interaction but also bounding it off. Many diarists remarked on the great “shyness” of the natives, the difficulties of approaching them. Shyness is not what we see in the following anecdote, however. The French at Bruny Island encountered a group of women, one of whom stepped forward and made signs to the French to sit and lay down their guns, the sight of which frightened them, says Péron (2006:198). (And so it might have: Baudin [1974:323] reports having aimed at people and says he only had to shift his gun to see how much people feared it. We may guess they had experience of its use.) After they sat, the women were all vivacity, talking, laughing, gesticulating, twisting and turning—when “M. Bellefin began to sing, accompanying himself with very lively, very animated movements. The women were immediately quiet, watching M. Bellefin’s gestures as closely as they appeared to listen to his songs. At the end of each verse, some applauded with shouts, others burst out laughing, while the young girls (undoubtedly more timid) remained silent, showing nevertheless, by their motions and facial expressions, their surprise and satisfaction” (Péron 2006:199). After M. Bellefin finished, the most confident of the women “began to mimic his gestures and tone of voice in an extremely original and very droll manner, which greatly amused her friends. Then she, herself, started to sing in so rapid a fashion, that it would have been hard to relate such music to the ordinary principles of ours” (Péron 2006:199–200).
Here the woman’s action is clearly recognized as imitative of what the Frenchman did; but Péron seems to imply that she does it as much or more for her companions’ amusement as to amuse or engender any sort of commonality with the French. We may interpret this as a targeted mimicking for the benefit of the other women.
Here a participant (Bellefin) is the apparent focus of comment rather than (only) of intended communicative engagement. Where the person copied is an interlocutor like Bellefin rather than a nonparticipant in the interaction and copying is addressed to another intended audience, imitation often becomes a form of mockery and ironic comment rather than a bridge between those seemingly in direct interaction. The effect is to make an ostensible participant an outsider and to make those who receive the message the actual nearer (“in the know”) interlocutors. This episode seems to suggest a certain confidence on the woman’s part in drawing the distinction she did between insiders and the French outsiders.
Indeed, it may be that Bellefin’s attempt to engage the attention of the indigenous women had misfired or gone slightly astray. As we will see (Chapter 3), European venturers thought about how to engage the “natives,” whether by offering them various kinds of material items or by other forms of interaction. Often, imitations by indigenous people were of bodily actions that Europeans themselves deliberately deployed as part of a certain received and continually evolving set of ideas that these were the things that would captivate native audiences and serve as a way of evaluating their dispositions, a matter to which the visitors, as we shall see, paid considerable attention. This might be termed one kind of “framing” of imitative action, clearly arising from European preconceptions.
At this point, though, the woman does build a bridge more directly and materially with the French:
taking some pieces of charcoal from a reed bag, she crushed them in her hand and prepared to apply a coat of this dark paint to my face. I lent myself willingly to this well-meant whim. M. Heirisson was equally obliging and was given a similar mask. We then appeared to be a great object of admiration for these women: they seemed to look at us with gentle satisfaction and to congratulate us upon the fresh charms that we had just acquired. Thus, therefore, that European whiteness, of which our race is so proud, is nothing more than an actual deficiency, a kind of deformity that must, in these distant regions, yield to the colour of charcoal and to the dark red of ochre or clay. (Péron 2006:200)
On this occasion, then, having imitated the song in a way that seemed more directed toward her companions—though certainly provoked by and also directed
