Représenter l’identité au xviie siècle ou l’ange aux « siècles d'or » des nations : un masque « extraterrestre » entre (mé)tissage historique et (dé)guisement culturel

Abstract

From the 16th century, the Americas were the stage where local ethnic groups were made « alien to themselves » through religious and cultural European masks. Their agency (or « puissance d’agir ») relied in part on the perception of the (fashioned) appearance. In this article, I analyse its representative systems. Because the European Other is (dressed in) his apparition, I consider the baroque angel of the 17th and 18th centuries as an equivalent for the « Alien ». I argue that by this feature, he appears as an alienating agent, or even an alienated agent of and in this search for identity in which the extraterrestrial referent might act as a means to model the identity as and by an alteration. Through the semiotic analysis of socio-religious phenomena and paintings of the Seven Archangels and of scenes of religious processions, I identify frames that operated the agentive transfers between European and Indian clothing and cultural systems, and that on three levels – corporeal, cultural and imaginary. Thus I demonstrate that invading the image and imagination of the identity through culture, by interweaving the mecanisms of images, History and theatricality, (the habit of) the « alien » angel designed a well-formed frame where one (is re)presented (under) the mask of an altered clothing so that the indian dresses his self with an unalienated and quasi-disguising identity.

Keywords

• frame
• extraterrestrial
• Angels
• mask and disguise
• cultural transfers
• clothing culture (mode)