The Mickey Mouse kachina and other “Double Objects”: Hybridity in the material culture of colonial encounters

Abstract

Hybridity is a term used by anthropologists to characterize the amalgamation of influences from two (or more) different cultural groups. Hybridity has captivated archaeology in recent years, especially archaeologists investigating colonialism in Native American contexts. At the same time, a growing chorus of critics has begun to question anthropology’s devotion to hybridity and hybrid objects. These critics take issue with the term’s alleged Eurocentrism, implications of cultural purity, and evolutionary etymology. In this article, I address these critiques and advocate a more circumscribed use of hybridity in archaeology. I caution against the abandonment of the term entirely, because the archaeological identification of hybridity provides insights into both present-day (etic) and past (emic) perspectives on cultural amalgamation. Hybridity reveals the biases of contemporary researchers regarding the societies we study, as well as highlighting the ways in which power structures centered and marginalized colonial subjects in the past. To illustrate these points, I draw on case studies involving the Hopi Mickey Mouse kachina, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indigenous-colonial whips from the American Plains and southeast Australia, and seventeenth-century Pueblo ceramics from the American Southwest.