When reading the title “Bodies in Contact’, my mind goes almost automatically to an

image of a beach with the people of the land watching from a thick forest as white men anchor in

their ocean and stamp onto their shore. It goes to women using only what the universe gave them

to survive strange men from a foreign land. It goes to people stolen from homelands, destined to

never be free again. As we move further into the twenty-first century, The imaginary camera on

Earth continues to zoom out as society evolves to look at history in a more holistic light. Aside

from looking at the great empires of the world, we are turning to the common, everyday people.

What mattered to them, what made them human, and why their societies evolved the way they

did post-contact.

The centrality of bodies in colonial practice- what one can do, what one can’t, which

bodies matter more, and which bodies matter less is something that I in my historical education

hadn’t considered fully. How concepts like race, gender, and religion were sewn into peoples’

minds was something I thought about, but hadn't made the connection that interactions between

individuals play a part in the spread of it all. We are always paying attention to the empire, but

never to the individual soldiers conquering the lands and the struggles that different societies

face outside of perception. We gloss over the small histories in favor of those with power, even if

the power was oppressive and morally corrupt.

Reading this made me take a step back and realize that in the way of late-stage

capitalism, even I am not immune to thinking that colonialism, revolution, migration, and the

spread of ideas throughout the world is history, and that because it is now, the past is the past and

the way of our ancestors must be learned from and forgotten, unthinking of the people that will

come after I am long gone. It reinforced the very true fact that one needs to take a significant step
back when looking at the history of society and examine as many intersections as possible to get

even a slight understanding of the innards of the way our society works.

This essay also made me think about the way women, or an absence of traditionally

accepted masculinity, have been so alienated yet so central to contact between societies, and the

placement of said societies on a theoretical ladder of hierarchy. With the absence of women

physically in important moments throughout time comes a hole filled by discussion of why

“femininity” is inferior, wrong, and should be enforced to the standards of one particular culture.

This ostracization directly correlates to why despite its oppression, femininity in actuality or in

perception, is at the center of these conversations. The spotlight is always there, whether it be

under a lens of scrutiny, lust, or control. The female body has been relegated to unimportance,

but its’ control is so important to maintaining colonial power/stability that it is the first thing to

be stripped [literally] of its humanity and autonomy.

The importance of the human body to the “globalization” of ideas is something that flies

over the heads over the heads of many. The dehumanization of history because of colonialism

and its results is a truly disturbing phenomenon that I very strongly reject. An example that

comes to mind specifically is the rise of anthropology and its horridly racist immediate results,

even though the intention was to study. Because the people studying were directly benefiting

from “globalization” and its results, they thought nothing about the humanity of people outside

of Europe, or people of different races than them, although they were the ones responsible for

making race an issue in the first place. A field dedicated to understanding humans, our histories,

and our societies completely misunderstanding everything we have seemingly been put on the

planet for. I feel as if my perspective on history, though certainly broader than what is taught in
American school systems, has widened out to a more whole view- one that captures the

individuals and small histories along with the bigger picture.