Towards a history of the hammock: An Indigenous technology in the Atlantic world

Abstract

When Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere beginning in the fifteenth century, they learned that Indigenous groups across the Caribbean and South America valued few technologies as much as the hammock. Despite this, the technology has been neglected by scholars, revealing the shortcomings of frameworks that focus on ‘commodities,’ ‘resources,’ and even ‘objects,’ and underscoring the importance of centering subaltern technologies in Atlantic and European history. Much more than a bed, the hammock figured in healing, shamanic, and inter-social practices, including hospitality. It was precisely these intersubjective functions that enabled its transcultural movement. In settings of Indigenous healing and hospitality, early modern Europeans learned to value hammocks, and they swiftly incorporated them into the colonial apparatus, often in ways that furthered the dispossession of the communities from which the technology came. Yet even as the hammock became a settler-colonial technology, it still bore traces of Indigenous uses and meanings.