The Material Creativity of Affective Artifacts in the Dutch Colonial World

This article puts early modern material culture center stage in a discussion of relational reasoning in the first age of globalization. I argue that early modern featherwork functioned as a site of innovative cultural crossings and material experiments. A combined approach of in-depth archival research and imaging technologies reveals new insights into material choices and artisanal making processes that crafted the modalities of early modern feather fans' affectivity. I argue that the so-called Messel Standing Feather Fan points to the global scale of the trade in materials, the transmission of artisanal knowledge, and the blurred boundaries of consumer cultures in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Empire. Feather fans exemplify outstanding craft cultures that brought globally traded materials into dialogue with artisans' creative skills to craft the world of affective material experiences. This study of feather fans as affective artifacts transcends the widespread fetishization of featherwork as symbols of Amazonian Indigeneity. Instead, the fan's affectivity emerged from an early modern artisan's creative response to South American biodiversity, translating Amazonian biocreativity into the material aesthetics of early modern craft cultures. Charting the significance of biocreativity in an age of globalized consumerism and colonialism, this study of featherwork reconsiders seventeenth-century Indigenous-European material cultures.