Categories

I have been reading Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. I plan to write more about that later, but I started thinking about how hard it is to avoid thinking in today's categories.

I have been reading about the episode called "King Phillips War". The "war" apparently started as a result of conflict between one group of Indians and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Bay, but came to involve people over a large area.

Philbrick thinks in terms of two major categories: Europeans and Native Americans, each divided into subcategories of nationalities and tribes. I have read that Europeans did not think in terms of "race" until the voyages of discovery. Traveling by land from Europe to Asia there there were no apparent shift from race to race, but rather a blending of people's appearances. When one sailed from Europe to Asia, however, the people at the end of the voyage appeared quite different from those at the beginning of the voyage.

It made me wonder whether the native Americans had a concept of race before they acquired it from Europeans. How did the native Americans in what is now New England perceive the situation? Did they have a category of "Europeans"? Did they expect the immigrants from Europe to form coalitions, and did they feel the need for the native Americans to form coalitions? Or did they see the different communities of immigrants to be comparable to different tribes?

And how and when did they understand the differences among the categories of European nations? And how did the colonists understand their affiliation with the colony in which they lived versis the affiliation with a government in Europe or with an ethnic culture?

How did the Europeans understand the differences among Native Americans? Why were they willing to accept some native American communities as allies but not to accept others as neutrals but rather to make them enemies.

The English in New England and the Hispanics a couple of centuries earlier colonizing seemed to distinguish more between converts to Christianity and non-converts in ways that are much stronger than the way in which we make such distinctions.

It rather seems that a great deal of the conflict involved in the English colonization of what became New England may have resulted from a dissonance between the ways in which the European immigrants classified groups of people and the way in which the native Americans did.