The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England, by Cohen, M.

Abstract

In The Networked Wilderness, Matt Cohen discusses a number of communication systems within the Euro-Indigenous contact zones of early New England through a broad, cultural reading of what constitutes media, and, in the process, he disrupts academic divides that continue to treat oral and written/print cultures as distinct. Cohen is certainly not the first to denaturalize the binary treatment of media cultures influenced by Walter Ong's work, but he makes the convincing case that well-entrenched ideological divides within academic fields like the history of the book and American Indian studies, as well as strategic and political constructs of Native/non-Native identities, continue to reproduce the divide by emphasizing difference. Although American Indian studies recognizes the value of oral tradition, performance, and symbolic forms of record and signification such as wampum and totem, scholars of the history of the book have privileged Eurocentric print cultures and the well-established methods used to study them. The latter celebrates European technologies and texts as particularly conducive to free thinking and democracy but does not adequately consider associated performative acts, according to Cohen. He models an expansion of more insular approaches and the ways in which they might mutually inform one another. Cohen's cultural and contextual work troubles the excessively celebratory ideals of literacy and the static identity constructs found in historic and modern articulations of indigeneity.The Networked Wilderness is refreshing in its exploration of some not-so-obvious examples of communication systems. Cohen's approach is influenced by Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Raymond Williams, and like a number of cultural studies scholars, he understands media and communication broadly. He treats objects such as traps, maypoles, paths, and human bodies as well their intersections with performative acts as important components of "messaging systems" (p. 4). For example, traps were important subsistence tools in early New England that also provided clues as to who or what was moving through a particular region, including animals, people, and information. Similarly, Cohen successfully demonstrates the ways in which print texts are performative like speech acts, for example, through their formats, margins, strategic wording, script, subtler