Malcolm Gaskill: In-Betweeners

Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
Updated
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
Europeans were eager for Native Americans to tell them the location of precious metals and the source of beaver pelts. But less practical Indigenous knowledge needed either to be assimilated into the existing intellectual scheme of the world or placed outside it as a monstrous anomaly. Like the jumbled artefacts in Renaissance Wunderkammern, Indigenous travellers to Europe were made into spectacles: ethnographic specimens and sensational sideshows.