Art as Kinship: Signs of Life in the Eastern Woodlands

John L. Creese

Can archaeology make sense of art ‘after interpretation’? Post-human scholarship suggests
that conventional approaches to art, guided by Cartesian ontology, fail to account for the
deeper kinship between things and thoughts. But the growing disillusionment with repre-
sentation leaves art and the semiotic questions it raises in limbo. Can we recover an ade-
quate social theory of art, semiosis and the subject in a post-humanist world? I submit that
we can by building on Eduardo Kohn’s thesis that life beyond the human is constitutively
semiotic. Art, as a semiotic involution of life’s animating processes, is form-taking and
form-replicating activity. This form-taking is open-ended and prospective, continuously
reaching beyond itself to refigure specific cases as general kinds. This occasions a process
of emergence through which novel ‘reals’—including societies and selves—are produced.
Extending Sahlins’ definition of kinship to include human/non-human relations, I argue
that seventeenth-century Iroquoian art was about kinning—the making of relatives—and
its power to form and reform relations of all sorts was central to its success.

Art and the crisis of representation
Art is often thought of as a vehicle for ideas. Its most
salient attribute seems to be its ability to carry mean-
ing, to act as a symbol or representation. An educated
middle-class gallery goer, in contemplating a work of
art, is likely to ask, ‘what does this piece say about X?’.
By and large, archaeologists puzzling over the frag-
ments of an ancient figurine do much the same. From
this standpoint, the obvious way to make sense of art,
past or present, is to infer its communicative purpose,
its symbolic load (e.g. Forge 1973; Munn 1973). Second
only to language, art seems to epitomize the Geertzian
premise that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun’ (Geertz 1973, 5). Es-
pecially through the influence of critical theory, this
way of interpreting art has served archaeology rea-
sonably well. Understood as ideology, for instance,
art reveals much about the naturalization of histor-
ically particular social identities, political configura-
tions and power relationships (e.g. Blanton et al. 1996;
DeMarrais et al. 1996; Guernsey 2006; Houston et al.
2006; Leone & Little 1993; Pilali-Papasteriou 1989).
In spite of the undeniable productivity of this
thesis over the years, a number of archaeologists have
begun to challenge some of its basic premises, includ-
ing the foundational concepts of representation and
interpretation (Alberti et al. 2013; Olsen 2012). The cri-
tique comes most compellingly from post-humanism,
a rather loose-knit movement taking shape across
the social sciences that draws inspiration from such
sources as phenomenology (Ingold 2008), actor net-
work theory (Callon & Law 1995; Latour 2005) and
Deleuzian assemblage theory (Bennett 2005; DeLanda
2006; Deleuze & Guattari 2004). Post-humanist schol-
arship challenges many of the conceptual binaries that
western social theory has long depended on, includ-
ing any simple, clear-cut distinction between matter
and meaning, things and thoughts (Barad 2007;
Boivin 2004). In such work, there is a conscious effort
to move away from ‘interpretative’ questions. Rather,
post-human scholars are concerned to reveal the mu-
tual constitution of people and things (Hodder 2012);
to show how matter exerts an historical force exceed-
ing human intentions and plans (Fowler 2013; Harris
2016); and to demonstrate how certain assemblages
of persons and substances exhibit emergent qualities
all their own (Jones 2012; Olsen 2007; Van Oyen 2016;
Webmoor & Witmore 2008; Witmore 2007). These
intellectual developments arguably represent an

Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27:4, 643–654 

C 2017 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

doi:10.1017/S095977431700066X Received 19 April 2017; Accepted 13 August 2017; Revised 11 August 2017

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 John L. Creese
important corrective for a discipline in which the
material world tends to be subordinated to human
intentions, plans and thoughts (Webmoor & Witmore
2008). Post-humanism challenges us to consider the
ways in which real entities and effects emerge from
the relationships in which materials, energies and
subjects are always already caught up (Harris 2014;
Robb 2013).
As indicated above, a corollary of this has been
a critique of representation as the proper target of an
interpretative archaeology (cf. Anderson & Harrison
2010; Thrift 2008). Harris sums up the argument as
follows:
The result of both the humanism and idealism
present in archaeology is that things—and I mean
that in the broadest sense possible … are reduced
fundamentally to representations rather than actual
material entities … What matters is not things them-
selves, their relations to the world, how they engage
and affect each other …, but rather what they mean
and represent for human beings. (Harris 2016, 22)
While these critiques are well taken, I believe we face
a potential baby-and-bathwater situation. The turn
away from representation would appear to leave art,
and the semiotic questions it raises, in limbo. As ar-
chaeologists increasingly seek to recover a place for
the non-human and the material in their accounts
of the past, art stands out as a recalcitrant entity—
uncompromisingly semiotic and therefore difficult
to cope with for a philosophy that seeks to resist
the idealist reduction of things to discourse (but see
Conneller 2011). Much post-human scholarship is ar-
guably handicapped by its tendency to elide certain
real differences between substances, intentional sub-
jects and complex historical assemblages. One need
not embrace a hard Cartesianism to recognize that
selves and signs, at once consubstantial and seamless
with the wider world of matter and energy, exhibit
specific emergent properties that render them distinct
(cf. Kohn 2013). To ignore this is perhaps rhetorically
useful in unseating humanist and idealist assump-
tions, but is in a sense a pyrrhic victory if the result
is an inability for archaeology to engage in meaning-
ful social critique.
This raises a critical question for those wishing
to treat art (and the semiotic in material culture more
broadly) after humanism: can we recover an adequate
social theory of semiosis, power and the subject in a
post-human world? Put another way, I suggest that
if the so-called ontological turn is to be more than
a fitful one, it will have to take seriously the related
issues of signification and subjectivity, rather than
sweeping them to the sidelines under the aegis of
ontological symmetry.
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This leads to the central problem this paper aims
to address: how can archaeology make sense of art ‘after
interpretation’ (e.g. Alberti et al. 2013; Olsen 2012)? The
preliminary answer I offer here builds on two concor-
dant foundations: Tim Ingold’s (2011) efforts to place
life, or animacy, at the centre of anthropology and Ed-
uardo Kohn’s (2013) argument that life beyond the hu-
man is constitutively semiotic. Art, from the stand-
point I seek to develop, does not radically separate
humans from things or culture from nature. Nor is
it the exclusive domain of human minds cut off from
the world’s goings on (cf. Malafouris 2004). As a semi-
otic involution of the animating processes inherent to
life itself, art is first and foremost form-taking and form-
replicating activity. Because of its iconic and indexi-
cal qualities, this form-taking is always open-ended
and prospective, continuously reaching beyond it-
self to refigure specific cases as general kinds. By
virtue of this, it also occasions a process of emergence,
one through which novel ‘reals’—including societies
and selves—are produced. With this in mind, I ex-
plore a particular example of Native American wood-
land art of and as kinship. Extending Sahlins’ (2011)
definition of kinsfolk as ‘mutual persons’ to include
human/non-human relations, I suggest that wood-
land art operated at the nexus of social projects of
reciprocal subjectification. It was about kinning—the
making of relatives—and its power to form and regen-
erate relations of all sorts was central to its success.
The semiotic constitution of life
Living dynamics … are constitutively semiotic. The
semiosis of life is iconic and indexical. Symbolic
reference, that which makes humans unique, is an
emergent dynamic that is nested within this broader
semiosis of life from which it stems and on which it
depends. (Kohn 2013, 55)
Arguably, what is needed at this stage is not another
theory of material agency, but a more expansive view
of semiosis (cf. Boivin 2008; Crossland 2013). Tradi-
tional approaches to art in archaeology are sustained
by an essentially linguistic model of the sign. It has
been difficult to shake this view, originating with Fer-
dinand de Saussure and promoted in the new archae-
ology by Binford (e.g. 1971, 16) among many oth-
ers, that symbols are defined by the arbitrary asso-
ciation of meaning with form in human minds. The
problems with this model have been known for a
while (e.g. Robb 1998), but deeper implications have
not always been recognized. Hodder (1986), for in-
stance, noted the iconic qualities of material culture
signs. However, he and many others in the early 1990s
continued to advocate an essentially hermeneutic
 Art as Kinship
approach to ‘reading the past’ (Shanks & Tilley 1987;
Tilley 1990). This work failed to appreciate the more
profound ontological implications of the observation
that signs can have non-arbitrary relations with what
they signify (Boivin 2008, 41). As long as semiosis is
modelled after language-like self-referential systems
of meaning, it comes to be viewed as (potentially) rad-
ically divorced from a ‘real world’. Of course, this
makes little sense, as phenomenologists have noted
(see Ingold 2013). What phenomenology has not of-
fered is a semiotic theory that deals adequately with
the constitutive role of representation in the vital pro-
cesses of living matter.
In his challenging and groundbreaking work,
How Forests Think (2013), Eduardo Kohn advances an
alternate solution to the twin problems of human ex-
ceptionalism and idealism, one that embraces semio-
sis as a pervasive and generative dimension of living
systems ‘beyond the human’. Kohn’s approach is dis-
tinctive, in that he develops a positive role for signifi-
cation and subjectivity in post-human theory, rather
than obscuring the distinctions between living and
non-living actors. Drawing on the lesser known semi-
otic theory of C.S. Peirce (1998), Kohn suggests that
sign relations are endemic to emergent living assem-
blages and so are not the exclusive domain of human
minds. According to Kohn (2013, 38), the indexical
and iconic dimensions of signs reveal representation
to be something ‘more general and widely distributed
than human language’, something shared among a
wider ecology of living selves.
Central to Kohn’s case is the assertion, derived
from Peirce (1998), that all relations are fundamen-
tally semiotic (Kohn 2013, 83). Somewhat counter-
intuitively, this view places representation at the heart
of a relational realist ontology, rather than relegating
it to the margins. Where representation subsumes
the purely symbolic (i.e. arbitrary convention), it
also merges with the more general relations of cause
and effect (indexicality) and the replication or fractal
amplification of similar forms (iconicity) that are
inherent to living systems. Indexes and icons are
particularly important to Kohn because they indicate
that those dense Geertzian webs of signification that
typify the human condition are not fully closed and
conventional, but permeable and open to the ‘form-
generating and form-amplifying’ processes of life
itself.
In order to illustrate the peculiar ‘life of signs’ be-
yond the human, Kohn draws on Jakob von Uexkull’s
(1982, 57) discussion of wood tick behaviour. Wood
ticks have a limited ability to sense the world around
them. Mammals suitable for hosts are detected as
warmth, the texture of skin and the smell of butyric
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acid found in mammalian blood (Kohn 2013, 84). Con-
sequently, any mammal—whether human, dog, or
deer—will be perceived by the tick as the same kind of
thing. The limited experiential world of the tick is in-
structive, because it illustrates the generative proper-
ties of such iconic ‘confusions’, or failures to discrim-
inate in the world of living systems:
For the tick, one kind of mammal is, in Peircean
terms, iconic of another […] When we treat icons
(signs that signify through similarity) we usually
think of the ways in which we take them to be
like some aspect of something else that we already
know to be different. We do not, as I mentioned,
confuse a stick figure depiction of a man posted on
the door of a washroom with the person who might
enter through that door. But I’m alluding here to
a more fundamental—and often misunderstood—
iconic property, one that underlies all semiosis. To
the tick, mammals are equivalent, simply because
the tick doesn’t notice the differences among the be-
ings it parasitizes. This iconic confusion is produc-
tive. It creates ‘kinds.’ There emerges a general class
of beings whose members are linked to each other
because of the ways they are all noticed by ticks …
(Kohn 2013, 84–5)
Critically, this emerging general class of beings cannot
be reduced to an idea in the mind of the tick—it has
actual repercussions for the individuals so related. In
this sense the representation exceeds the tick in impor-
tant ways. Lyme disease, for instance, comes to travel
among members of the new kind. The general cat-
egory produced by the tick’s failure to discriminate
thereby has substantial effects that reverberate and
amplify across the wider ecological system in which
it appears.
The implications of this for social theory are
potentially profound. One conclusion is that the real
is not only that which is singular and unique (i.e.
the actual). Kohn insists (2013, 159) ‘that “generals,”
that is, habits, or regularities, or, in Peircean terms,
“thirds,” are “real”’. The ‘indifference to difference’
exhibited by the tick is, then, an example of a more
widespread property of semiosis in the realm of
life, one through which general kinds and classes
proliferate and act back on their component parts.
That ‘emergent reals’ (Kohn 2013, 165) appear in com-
plex living assemblages, and that human semiosis is
necessarily suspended in such developments, imply
that representation is not a metaphysical Rubicon
of human exceptionalism. It is part of a broader
phenomenon characteristic of living systems, one de-
fined by the unfolding production and reproduction
of relational connections that endure over time and
generate the necessary conditions for future life.
 John L. Creese
Art and animacy
We need a theory not of agency, but of life. (Ingold
2013, 97)
Where does this leave the study of art? Kohn’s dis-
cussion of semiosis beyond the human allows us to
place representation at the heart of a relational realist
theory of art. Building from this, I define art here (not
at all exclusively) as form-taking and form-replicating
activity. In this it is both fundamentally semiotic and
part and parcel of the wider living systems in which
it is nested and to which it owes its animation. Cross-
land (2013, 4), also drawing on Peirce, makes a related
point, noting that interpretation is necessarily mate-
rial and embodied. The interpretation of signs is in
and of this world, not apart from it. People’s thoughts
and intentions about the form or meaning of artworks
cannot exist apart from their embodied activities of
dwelling, making and perceiving. As Ingold (2013, 96)
puts it, ‘to view the work [of art] is to join the artist as
a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the
world, rather than behind it to an originating inten-
tion of which it is the final product’. That artworks are,
in a certain immediate and limited sense, the product
of human action and intention is not in doubt. How-
ever, by virtue of their indexical and iconic modali-
ties, they also partake in a life of signs that exceeds
the human.
Alfred Gell’s work on art and agency arguably
makes some important strides in this direction. In a se-
ries of influential publications (1992; 1996; 1998), Gell
vigorously and persuasively re-oriented the anthro-
pology of art from traditional questions of meaning
and aesthetics to the problem of what art does, how
it is socially affecting and affective. He did so by fo-
cusing squarely on art’s indexical properties, rather
than its formal symbolic content. According to Gell
(1998, 17), art’s power to enchant, and thereby spur
people to action, depends on the fact that humans
respond to it as an index of social agency. Through
the abduction of agency on the part of artists and
viewers, art objects gain a kind of secondary social
agency—they become ‘technologies of enchantment’
(Gell 1992).
In much of this work, Gell very clearly places pri-
mary social agency in the hands of intentional human
subjects. For this he comes in for strong criticism from
Ingold, who writes (2013, 96): ‘Nowhere is the dead
hand of objectification more clearly at work than in
… Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency’. For Ingold, an arte-
fact or artwork’s form is not imposed by prior hu-
man intentions on brute matter, but unfolds as makers
think from materials and follow their flow: ‘Artisans or
practitioners who follow the flow are, in effect, itiner-
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ants, wayfarers, whose task is to enter the grain of the
world’s becoming and bend it to an evolving purpose’
(Ingold 2013, 25). Form, in this account, emerges from
a ‘moving along together’, or animate correspondence
of materials and craftspeople. In this way, materials
and their lively qualities become the seat of thoughts
(Ingold 2013, 108).
While Ingold resists the term representation, pre-
sumably because of its Saussurean connotations, the
kind of sensitive thinking from materials he describes
is precisely to posit the life of signs beyond the human
that Kohn articulates. There is room, consequently,
for rapprochement between Gell’s and Ingold’s posi-
tions. As Gell’s own example of anti-personnel land
mines demonstrates, the social agency of art he de-
scribes is effectively an involution or semiotic redou-
bling of a wider indexical phenomenon in which hu-
man intentionality is itself suspended in relations of
cause and effect that are always already distributed
well beyond the embodied subject:
Pol Pot’s soldiers possessed (like all of us) what I
shall later discuss as ‘distributed personhood’. As
agents, they were not just where their bodies were,
but in many different places (and times) simultane-
ously. Those mines were components of their iden-
tities as human persons, just as much as their finger-
prints or the litanies of hate and fear which inspired
their actions. (Gell 1998, 21)
As Kohn’s work shows, the indexical relations
that link such diverse entities as artworks and land
mines to selves depend on a more fundamental semi-
otic modality—iconicity—that is largely neglected in
the Gellian tradition. Like the tick’s confusion among
mammals, the iconic dimension in art is productive—
it generates kinds. This is exemplified by the curious
phenomenon that Danto (1964) called the ‘is of artistic
identification’. For Danto, art is defined by the spe-
cial use of this ‘is’. The ‘is’ of artistic identification is
in play, for example, when ‘I point, for my compan-
ion’s benefit, to a spot in the painting before us and
say “That white dab is Icarus”’ (Danto 1964, 576). It
is a mode of identification that is neither naïve nor
dissimulative, but precisely indifferent to the differ-
ence between, for instance, a painting of a pipe and
a three-dimensional one carved from cherry wood—
an observation played upon in Rene Magritte’s The
Treachery of Images of 1929 (Fig. 1). Another way of
saying this is that the icon and its object share a cer-
tain kinship that renders an emergent real. Through
the ‘is’ of artistic identification, the iconic in art gener-
ates kinds whose instances exhibit an odd quality of
being somehow ‘intrinsic to one another’s existence’
(Sahlins 2011, 2).
 Art as Kinship
Figure 1. (Colour online) ‘The Treachery of Images’, René
Magritte, 1929 (Image: courtesy Los Angeles County
Museum of Art.).
Kinship and power in the Eastern Woodlands
Marshall Sahlins has recently suggested that the an-
thropological notion of kinship is best captured by the
quality of mutuality of being (Sahlins 2011). Kinship,
for Sahlins, is predicated on the transmission of life
capacities among mutual persons. Kinsmen are ‘peo-
ple who live each other’s lives and die each other’s
deaths’ (Sahlins 2011, 14). I find it useful to appro-
priate and extend this idea to the iconic and indexi-
cal operation of artworks in order to describe the way
they come to be involved in the generation and repro-
duction of the subject. By virtue of the operation of
the iconic ‘is’, art is an entangler of selves. It propa-
gates relations. It generates kin. But it does so, not as
the materialization of an ideology originating some-
where outside physical reality, but from within the
form-taking and form-relating processes of the ani-
mate world itself. I call this its kinning power (cf. How-
ell 2003). To make sense of it, we shall need to take up
Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004, 450–51) recommenda-
tion to follow the material (cf. Weismantel & Meskell
2014); living thoughts spring from this following, to-
day as in the past.
A striking example of the kinning power of art
can be found in the Northern Iroquoian pinched-
face effigy smoking pipe (Figs. 2–8). This distinc-
tive class of low-fired clay pipe was popular among
the Iroquoian-speaking Huron-Wendat, Tionnantaté,
Neutral and Seneca tribes during the early to mid sev-
enteenth century. At that time, Iroquoian peoples—
swidden farmers and middlemen in the burgeon-
ing fur trade—were becoming important geopolit-
ical players whose interests were increasingly tied
to the imperial fortunes of France, England and the
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Figure 2. (Colour online) Left side view of a pinched-face
effigy pipe bowl (elbow and stem are missing) from the
Huron-Wendat Thomson-Walker site (c. ad 1640–49).
(Photograph: courtesy Royal Ontario Museum.)
Netherlands (Engelbrecht 2003; Trigger 1976). It was
also a period of significant disruptions to Iroquoian
society in the form of epidemic diseases and mission-
ary efforts (Birch 2015; Warrick 2008).
The pinched-face pipe is particularly abundant
at village sites of the Wendat and Tionnantaté, who
may have introduced them to the Seneca following
their dispersal by the latter in 1649 (Matthews 1976,
15–16; 1979). Unlike most clay elbow pipes of the pe-
riod, which were decorated with abstract geometric
designs, pinched-face effigies stand out for their an-
thropomorphism. A relatively oversized head extends
above the rim of the bowl (Figs. 2–4). The face is an-
gled upward facing the smoker, with the back of the
head leaning slightly over the bowl. The facial fea-
tures, schematic and lacking in detail, include sunken
lidless eyes, a protruding nose, hollow cheeks (giving
the type its name) and a mouth rounded as though
singing, calling, blowing, or drawing breath (Fig. 4).
The top of the head rises above the forehead to a con-
ical or cylindrical protrusion reminiscent of a turban
or top-knot. Normally, the right hand is raised to one
side of the mouth, and two or three incised lines radi-
ate from both corners back across the lower half of the
face (Figs. 2–3).
 John L. Creese
Figure 3. (Colour online) Right side view of a
pinched-face effigy pipe bowl (elbow and stem are missing)
from the Huron-Wendat Thomson-Walker site (c. ad
1640–49). Note the right hand raised to the corner of the
mouth. (Photograph: courtesy Royal Ontario Museum.)
Below the figure’s chin, a punctated ridge runs
down the centre of the bowl (which forms the torso)
along the top of the stem to the mouthpiece, recall-
ing a trachea, spine, or sternum connecting the mouth
of the effigy figure to the mouth of the smoker. In
a popular variant, the figure’s chest features an in-
cised chevron design, alternately suggesting a styl-
ized rib cage or decorated pottery vessel (Figs. 5–6).
Another ridge representing the back-bone runs down
the opposite side of the bowl, terminating at the
pipe’s elbow. In many examples, the figure’s back
is heavily hunched. The arms, depicted in low re-
lief, bend at right or acute angles hugging the torso,
and reach toward mouth or breast. Digits are ab-
sent or slight incisions. In simplified versions of the
figure, legs, waist and buttocks are absent, or only
vaguely hinted at. In more elaborated versions, these
features are simply but carefully executed, and small
punctates or incisions mark out the surface of legs
drawn up beneath the body in a squatting position.
Sex or gender, if one is intended, is typically am-
biguous (no genitalia are shown), although a few rare
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Figure 4. (Colour online) Smoker’s view of a pinched-face
effigy pipe bowl (elbow and stem are missing) from the
Huron-Wendat Thomson-Walker site (c. ad 1640–49).
Note the rounded mouth and ‘tracheal’ detail running
down the figure’s throat. (Photograph: courtesy Royal
Ontario Museum.)
elaborated versions feature breasts (Kearsley 1997;
Fig. 6).
Pinched-face effigy pipes have been identified
and described at Iroquoian village sites since the
nineteenth century, but few interpretations were
offered until the 1970s. In a widely cited article, Zena
Matthews (1976) advanced a shamanic hypothesis
that remains the dominant one today. Matthews’ ar-
gument proceeded by matching a syndrome of traits
associated with circumpolar shamanism (as described
by Furst 1965 and Eliade 1972) with those of the ef-
figy figures. From this standpoint, she identifies the
cone-shaped protrusion of the head with the shaman’s
‘horn of power’, closed or pupil-less eyes with a trance
state, the V-shaped torso design as skeletonization,
the blowing or sucking mouth with shamanic healing
and the hunched back with historic descriptions of
Iroquoian medicine men. Her interpretation receives
additional support from the observation that the style
proliferated about the time that the first European-
introduced epidemic diseases began decimating
Northern Iroquoian populations. If the pipes were
 Art as Kinship
Figure 5. Torso/bowl fragment of a pinched-face effigy
pipe from the Huron-Wendat Benson site. The back closely
resembles the form of a collared Wendat-style pottery
vessel. (Photograph: J.L. Creese.)
used as healing or apotropaic devices because of their
shamanic associations, it could explain their sudden
popularity at this time (Matthews 1976, 29). A more
exhaustive study of 323 pinched-face pipes by Kears-
ley (1997) largely supports and expands on Matthews’
findings. Kearsley finds the pipes to be highly stan-
dardized in manufacture, perhaps the product of low-
level craft specialization, and advances the hypothesis
that the type may have spread rapidly as part of a
Nativistic healing movement under the leadership
of several historically known Wendat medicine men
who were then countering Jesuit missionary efforts.
These studies have added much to our under-
standing of pinched-face effigies, and it is not my in-
tention to dispute their specific interpretations here.
Rather, I wish to point out what is missed by ap-
proaching artworks mainly as derivatives of pre-
existing ideologies. The theoretical position advanced
here requires us to see the artwork itself as an active
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Figure 6. (Colour online) Pinched-face effigy pipe from
Barton Township, Ontario, in the collections of the
Canadian Museum of History. Note the incised torso and
breasts. (Photograph: courtesy the Canadian Museum of
History.)
player in the becoming of the seventeenth-century Iro-
quoian subject. To achieve this, it is necessary to shift
away from viewing pipe effigies as simple correlates
of the shamanic and toward an understanding of the
power of images to generate relations and to reveal
unexpected kinships.
Let us begin with the pipe itself. As a pipe, the
pinched-face effigy was first and foremost iconic
of other Iroquoian clay smoking pipes. In the sev-
enteenth century, these pipes were widely used
for smoking native tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), a
moderately psycho-active plant associated with the
suppression of appetite and, as explained to Jesuit
missionaries by Iroquoian informants, pro-social and
dispassionate states of mind (Creese 2016a,b). Pipes
were shared in contexts that emphasized routine
hospitality as well as more formalized ritual and
political reciprocities. Smoking was thus an intersub-
jective affair and pipes and tobacco were given as
political gifts and reparation payments. Pipes also
 John L. Creese
Figure 7. (Colour online) Left side view of a pinched-face
effigy head fragment from the Huron-Wendat
Thomson-Walker site (c. ad 1640–49). The lower face has
been carefully chipped or pecked away.
played a key role in ceremonial condolence, adoption
and naming rituals among many groups across the
Eastern Woodlands. To the extent that the pipe oc-
casioned and mediated these diverse transpersonal
exchanges, it was also an index of them. Thinking
from the pipe, then, leads in one direction toward
pro-social exchange, shared consumption, the sat-
isfaction of bodily appetites, the payment of debts,
the relinquishing of hard feelings and the reciprocal
circulation of goods and substances among mutual
persons, i.e. kin.
As an effigy, moreover, the pipe’s particular im-
agery serves to redouble and compound these ba-
sic relations via several related routes. A series of
iconic identities, or indifferences to difference, are re-
vealed to the smoker via the ‘is’ of artistic identi-
fication. The pipe is itself a body. The smoker and
the pipe inhale and exhale as one. Both respire and
in the process consume the sacred plant. The one en-
tails the other, so that for the smoker to draw breath
is for the pipe to exhale; for the one to receive, the
other must give, and we are back to reciprocal ex-
change and, inevitably, the status of conjoint being
that defines kin. Here, the kinship in question is that
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Figure 8. (Colour online) Frontal view of a pinched-face
effigy head fragment from the Huron-Wendat
Thomson-Walker site (c. ad 1640–49). The lower face has
been carefully chipped or pecked away.
between pipe and smoker, rather than between smok-
ers, but the relation is directly parallel, so that the for-
mer indexes the latter. In both cases the revelation of
shared form in turn indexes shared breath among re-
ciprocally dependent bodies. Thus, the iconic propa-
gation of kinship among pipe and body is but an invo-
lution or adumbration of the wider kinship perduring
among transpersonal bodies. Crucially, this parallel
articulation is effected, not so much because the pipe
is falsely believed to be alive, as because the activity
of smoking itself animates pipe and smoker alike, re-
vealing a deeper kinship.
Moreover, the pipe was not just any body, but
one with certain characteristics. It was, I suggest, the
body of sacrifice, of giving more often than receiving.
The figure is emaciated and sometimes decrepit. Eyes
and cheeks are sunken, shoulders jut, waist is slen-
der and the ridges of the backbone and pelvis are evi-
dent. The hunched form suggests burdensome labour,
and in some cases, cross-hatching or more elaborate
incising on the back recalls the form of a burden bas-
ket. Among the Wendat, a major cause of illness was
a failure of soul fulfilment (Thwaites 1896–1901, vol.
10). Soul desires were revealed in dreams, and their
 Art as Kinship
fulfilment entailed the transfer of goods to the de-
sirous soul. Almost anything of value—kettles, axes,
pots, beads, pipes and so on—might be desired as a
cure (Thwaites 1896–1901, vol. 10). According to Je-
suit observers, after a sick person had dreamed, her
kin would spare no expense in acquiring the desired
goods. Specific foods (often in very large quantities)
as well as feasts and dances with certain proscrip-
tions were common soul desires (Tooker 1991, 86).
In all cases, the bonds of kin and clan were actual-
ized and renewed in the collective efforts to assemble
and transfer food and goods in satisfaction of the af-
flicted person’s desirous soul. In this dynamic, the ill
body was the product of neglect and longing resulting
from asymmetry in substantial exchanges among mu-
tual persons. Doctoring the sick required a compen-
satory transfer from kin; their sacrifice was the source
of healing. In a similar vein, the stereotypical Iroquois
medicine man was decrepit and misshapen (Kearsley
1997). In order to receive the gift of medicine power
or orenda, he was required to fast, and even to die and
be reborn (Matthews 1976). Once again, the iconic ex-
tension of kinship from the pipe’s body to other giv-
ing bodies can be seen as nested in, and indexical of,
a wider kinship among the interdependent sacrificial
bodies of mutual persons. ‘Gift-giving’, after all, as
Sahlins observes, ‘is life-giving’ (2011, 14).
Thinking from the material leads in yet another
direction: the pipe-body is also a vessel, which is to
say a medium for the transfer of nutritive and healing
substances. In the example illustrated in Figure 5, the
kinship between pipe, body and pot is made explicit.
From the back, the figure’s torso takes the form of
a collared, castellated pottery vessel of recognizably
Iroquoian style. The nested V-shaped design on the
chest of other examples recalls a ubiquitous incised
design found on the castellations of seventeenth-
century Wendat cooking vessels (Fig. 7). Moreover,
an argument can be made that the geometric designs
on Iroquoian pots are themselves references to bas-
ketry. It may be no accident that a few elaborated
figures also depict breasts. Women were the primary
food producers in Iroquoian societies. They were
also experts in pottery and textile manufacture. In
the Iroquois creation myth, maize, beans and squash
(collectively referred to in Seneca as dio’he’ko, mean-
ing ‘our sustainers’: Cornelius 1992, 6), as well as
tobacco and other medicines, sprang from the body
of the daughter of the sky-woman after her death.
Maize, the most economically important crop, grew
from her breasts. As the woman’s body produced
nourishing milk, so the cooking pot, via her labour,
produced nourishing sagamité, the ubiquitous Wen-
dat maize stew (Tooker 1991, 68). Via this extended
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sequence of iconic equivalencies, the reciprocal ex-
change of life-giving substance (breath or tobacco)
which typified the person/pipe relation was broad-
ened to encompass activities of productive labour
and household consumption associated with the
common pot.
Returning now to the problem of emergence, we
must ask what general kinds and subjectivities were
produced by these iconic and indexical operations,
and how they acted back on the evolving landscape
of action in which they took shape (cf. Robb 2013).
Persons, pipes and pots exhibited real kinship be-
cause of the way each served to metabolize and trans-
mit life-giving substances: ‘The living body […] is
only sustained thanks to continually taking in mate-
rials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging
into them through the processes of respiration and
metabolism’ (Ingold 2013, 94). The emergent real pro-
duced through these articulations of common form—
that which united and animated their shared prop-
erties and affects—was consequently something like
life-giving power (i.e., medicine power or orenda, its
primary avatars being corn and tobacco) which was
active within and transmitted by bodies that produce
and consume, give and take (which is to say, among
kinsfolk or mutual persons). What was dialectically
produced, then, was nothing less than kin and power.
I want to emphasize that, like mammals for the tick,
these phenomena were emergent reals, neither subjec-
tive nor objective, nested within a broader unfolding
landscape of action in which persons and power were
really and continually produced and reproduced as
conjoint and mutual (Creese 2012).
This leads to a better understanding of why pipe
effigies appeared when they did. As families were
decimated by unknown diseases, the response of Iro-
quoian mutual persons was to redouble efforts to re-
new and consolidate kin networks and to channel life-
sustaining and healing substances toward the sick and
dying. The pinched-face pipe enfolded the lived re-
alities of Iroquoian production and consumption into
itself, allowing it, too, to partake in those life-giving
transmissions. For these reasons, pinched-face effigies
also lived lives and died deaths. Few examples are
whole—in most cases, the head was cleaved from the
body prior to discard. Kearsley (1997) notes that heads
were even designed to be removable, and he presents
a good argument that breakage was routine and in-
tentional. In the example illustrated in Figures 7 and
8, the head has been removed and its face carefully
chipped away. Effigies lived and died because they
helped form and sustain the emergent real, which for
the Iroquois was synonymous with mutual being and
life-giving power.
 John L. Creese
Closing thoughts
I have focused in this paper on the primacy of icons
and indexes in the form-taking and form-relating ac-
tivity that animates art and world alike. Through
the iconic propagation of shared form, art gener-
ates emergent realities, proliferates kinds and makes
relations, including novel thoughts and selves. In
the Northern Iroquoian case, those selves were mu-
tual persons, i.e. kin, defined by the ‘transmission
of life capacities’ among them (Sahlins 2011, 14).
The pinched-face effigy pipe was subsumed within
and recursively acted upon these emergent realities,
inasmuch as it partook in the wider relational pro-
cesses that shaped the seventeenth-century Iroquoian
world.
As this case shows, the abandonment of the prob-
lem of representation in some post-human theory,
however tempting, will not do. Consequently, nor
will ignoring art, or reclassifying it as agentive or vi-
tal matter without acknowledging the centrality of
semiosis in the emergent properties of human/thing
entanglements. Acknowledging the ways in which
‘the us and the it slip-slide into each other’ (Bennett
2010, 4) is a valuable starting point, but to do so ef-
fectively we must make room for semiosis and sub-
jectivity, as Kohn has suggested, in an anthropology
beyond the human. From this standpoint, art makes
history because of the way it nests the human signifi-
cation of life within a greater life of signs.
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed directly and indirectly to the
development of this paper. I’m particularly grateful to John
Robb for the invitation to participate in the 2016 SAA fo-
rum on art, and to the varied contributors to that discus-
sion for their thoughtful commentary. For their instruction
regarding the ‘the making of relatives’ in indigenous prac-
tices, I am greatly indebted to Anna Littleghost and Christy
Goulet. I would also like to thank Justin Jennings and April
Hawkins of the Royal Ontario Museum for their assistance
with collections research there, and North Dakota State Uni-
versity for conference travel funding. Any errors, misunder-
standings, or omissions are my own.
John L. Creese
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
North Dakota State University
428 Minard Hall
1210 Albrecht Boulevard
Fargo, ND 58102
USA
Email: john.creese@ndsu.edu
652
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Author biography
John Laurence Creese is an Assistant Professor in the depart-
ment of Sociology and Anthropology at North Dakota State
University. His research explores changes in the configura-
tion of social power, community, and identity among ances-
tral Iroquoian societies of eastern North America.

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