|
Captivity narratives are usually stories of people captured by enemies whom they consider uncivilized, or whose beliefs and customs they oppose. The best-known captivity narratives are those concerning the indigenous peoples of North America. These narratives (and questions about their accuracy) have an enduring place in literature, history, ethnography, and the study of Native peoples. However, captivity narratives have also come to play a major role in the study of contemporary religious movements, thanks to scholars of religion like David G. Bromley and James R. Lewis. In this article, both main types of captivity narratives are considered. Traditionally, historians have made limited use of certain captivity narratives. They have regarded the genre with suspicion because of its ideological underpinnings. As a result of new scholarly approaches, historians with a more certain grasp of Native American cultures are distinguishing between plausible statements of fact and value-laden judgements in order to study the narratives as rare sources from "inside" Native societies.〔Neal Salisbury. "Review of Colin Caolloway, 'North Country Captives: Selected Narratives of Indian Captivities'", ''American Indian Quarterly'', 1994. vol. 18 (1). p. 97〕 Contemporary historians such as Linda Colley and anthropologists such as Pauline Turner Strong have also found the narratives useful in analyzing how the colonists constructed the "other", as well as what the narratives reveal about the settlers' sense of themselves and their culture, and the experience of crossing the line to another. Colley has studied the long history of English captivity in other cultures, both the Barbary pirate captives who preceded those in North America, and British captives in cultures such as India, after the North American experience. Certain North American captivity narratives involving Native peoples were published from the 18th through the 19th centuries, but they reflected a well-established genre in English literature. There had already been English accounts of captivity by Barbary pirates, or in the Middle East, which established some of the major elements of the form. Following the American experience, additional accounts were written after British people were captured during exploration and settlement in India and East Asia. Other types of captivity narratives, such as those recounted by apostates from religious movements (i.e. "cult survivor" tales), have remained an enduring feature of modern media, and currently appear in books, periodicals, film, and television.〔See Joseph Laycock, "Where Do They Get These Ideas? Changing Ideas of Cults in the Mirror of Popular Culture" ''Journal of the American Academy of Religion'', March 2013, Vol. 81, No. 1, pp. 80–106. Laycock references an episode of the animated series ''King of the Hill'' in which young women captured by a "cult" and subjected to a low-protein diet are rescued Texas style: An open air beef barbeque is held outside the "cult" compound. When the women smell the steaks a-cookin', and are handfed bite-sized morsels, they're instantly rescued from their "brainwashed" state, and return to cultural normalcy. Laycock's work shows how anti-cult captivity narratives – whether real or fictional, dramatic or comedic – remain a staple of modern media.〕 The unifying factor in most captivity narratives, whether they stem from geopolitical or religious conflicts, is that the captive portrays the captors' way of life as alien, undesirable, and incompatible with the captive's own (typically dominant) culture. This underscores the utility of captivity narratives in garnering support for social control measures, such as removing Native Americans to "reservations", or stigmatizing participation in religious movements – whether Catholicism in the nineteenth century, or ISKCON in the twentieth. Captivity narratives tend to be culturally chauvinistic, viewing an "alien" culture through the lens of the narrator's preferred culture, thus making (possibly unfair) value judgements like "Puritans good, Indians bad." ==Background== Because of the competition between New France and New England in North America, colonists in New England were frequently taken captive by Canadiens and their Indian allies. (Similarly, the New Englanders and their Indian allies took Canadians and Indian prisoners captive.) According to Kathryn Derounian-Stodola, statistics on the number of captives taken from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries are imprecise and unreliable, since record-keeping was not consistent and the fate of hostages who disappeared or died was often not known.〔Introduction, ''Women's Indian Captivity Narratives,'' p. xv (New York: Penguin, 1998)〕 Yet conservative estimates run into the thousands, and a more realistic figure may well be higher. For some statistical perspective, however, between King Philip's War (1675) and the last of the French and Indian Wars (1763), approximately 1,641 New Englanders were taken hostage.〔Vaughan, Alden T., and Daniel K. Richter. ("Crossing the Cultural Divide:Indians and New Englanders, 1605-1763." ) ''Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society'' 90 (1980): p. 53; 23-99.〕 During the decades-long struggle between whites and Plains Indians in the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of women and children were captured.〔White, Lonnie J. "White Women Captives of Southern Plains Indians, 1866-1875," ''Journal of the West 8 (1969): 327-54〕 Many narratives included a theme of redemption by faith in the face of the threats and temptations of an alien way of life. Barbary captivity narratives, accounts of English people captured and held by Barbary pirates, were popular in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. The first Barbary captivity narrative by a resident of North America was that of Abraham Browne (1655). The most popular was that of Captain James Riley, entitled ''An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Brig Commerce'' (1817). Jonathan Dickinson's Journal, ''God's Protecting Providence ...'' (1699), an account by a Quaker of shipwreck survivors captured by Indians in Florida who survived by placing their trust in God to protect them, has been described by the ''Cambridge History of English and American Literature'' as "in many respects the best of all the captivity tracts."〔(''The Cambridge History of English and American Literature'' ). Volume XV. ''Colonial and Revolutionary Literature, Early National Literature,'' Part I, Travellers and Explorers, 1583-1763. 11. Jonathan Dickinson.] URL retrieved 24 March 2010〕 Ann Eliza Bleecker's epistolary novel, ''The History of Maria Kittle'' (1793), is considered the first known Captivity novel. It set the form for subsequent Indian Capture novels. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Captivity narrative」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|