Crafting 'The Indian'

<p> In Europe Indian hobbyism or Indianism has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. Indian hobbyists dress in homemade replicas of clothing craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds using ethnographies travel diaries and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany the Netherlands Belgium France and the Czech Republic this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play metaphor and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception imagination and creativity.</p>