| The dissertation addresses a nexus of problems related to anthropology's engagement with popular culture, national and global constructions, and grassroots social activism. It is a multi-sited ethnography and a historical tableau of cultural processes by which "traditional Native American cultures" are imagined, transformed, and incorporated into Euro-American societies. It constitutes the first in-depth study of European Indianists (also known as Wannabe Indians and Euro-Indians) as observed in the United States (among White and Black populations), Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, and the Caribbean. This ethnography is based on 18 months of field research and included participant observation, interviews, and archival research among Indianists in Russia, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, Belgium and Holland. I document a variety of East European engagements with Native American cultures including annual outdoor gatherings (pow-wows and Western weeks), agricultural communes, indigenous rights support actions, urban clubs, religious ceremonies, and more personal and familial settings. I also describe the influence of Indian stereotypes on Europeans' ideas of kinship, race, spirituality, personhood, and intellectual reflexivity. Using historical literature, I revise Philip Deloria's (1998) genealogy of Euro-American Indianism and expand upon it by showing that the reenactment of North American Indian cultures in the late 20th century is prefigured in early American captivity experiences and narratives. This cultural phenomenon not only began long before the dates set by Deloria's analysis but also continues to manifest deeply seated European values in contemporary perceptions of and interactions with Native Americans. I contend that the use of the image of the Noble Savage for the construction of non-native identities in the U.S. has served a goal of strengthening the majoritarian hold on the American continent in the face of its increasing cultural diversity, on the one hand, and the rise of the U.S. to the status of a world power, on the other. In a similar vein, the appropriation of Native American cultures contributes to the strengthening of European nationhood in the context of increasing globalization and competition with the United States. |
