“A carnival of promiscuous carnal indulgence”: bureaucrats’ ambivalence in reconciling capitalist production with native American habitus

Abstract

In 1921 the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) attempted to suppress ritual public performances in the Southwestern Pueblos. Several reams of documenting text were used to support this authorizing text. These documenting texts were affidavits purporting to describe ''degrading tendencies'' and ''immoral relations'' in the Puebloan habitus. The OIA used these sensationalized representations of the habitus of Native Americans' communities to promote and justify the policy of forced acculturation in the waning days of its implementation. What is perplexing is that these supporting texts were trotted out so late, decades after the major thrusts of the forced acculturation program had first been put into play. My purpose is to analyze the place of these texts in the forced acculturation program. I suggest, following Anne McClintock (1995) that the obsessive fascination that the public performances seem to have held for those who reported on and condemned them, represent a layered and complex intertwining of ambivalence about domestic social relations and gender with confusion about culture and labor. Examining a slice of the U.S. Government's policy of forced acculturation in a corner of the Native American world reveals a potentially implosive anxiety of reconciling the imposition of a desired mode of production with the persistence of a habitus perceived as celebrating the violation of appropriate domesticity.