Cross Cultural Medical and Natural Knowledge Exchange on the Mississippi Frontier between Gideon Lincecum and the Choctaw Nation: 1818 to 1833

Abstract

This paper closely investigates the natural and medical exchange of knowledge and its social and historical context between Gideon Lincecum (1793 – 1874) and his Choctaw neighbors in Mississippi between the years 1818 and 1833. In his book The Roots of Dependency (1983), Richard White suggests that the Choctaw were compelled to increasingly adopt European and Euro-American economic models at the expense of their traditional notion of reciprocal exchange. This resulted in a critical loss of their traditional means of subsistence and thus diminished political power compared to the United States. White is quite persuasive on the macroscopic level of his investigation, but this paper shows that in the interaction of Gideon Lincecum with the Choctaw, this broad view becomes more complex and problematic. Lincecum and the Choctaw elder Alikchi Chitto create a mutually satisfactory (though far from perfect) exchange of medical and natural knowledge by hybridizing Euro-American market exchange and Native American reciprocity. In addition to examining the content of this knowledge as well as the historical and social context of the exchange, this paper will investigate what knowledge was valued by each party as a function of their cultural perspective and why Lincecum marginalized and thus suppressed the mystical elements of Choctaw natural knowledge.