Christopher M. Watts (University of Toronto, Canada)

Long regarded as both striking and symbolically-charged, ceramic effigy pipes remain one of the more celebrated achievements of precontact through contact-period Iroquoian artisans. The faces of Mammalian (including human), avian, reptilian and other effigy forms, rendered in three-dimensional detail on the bowl and invariably oriented toward the smoker, are considered hallmarks of this artifact class. Traditional interpretations tend to regard smoking as a communicative exercise and such effigies as material proxies for guardian spirits within an animistic frame delineated by representation. The smoker (subject) is seen as a contemplative yet detached viewer set over against an idealized image (object). Drawing on the phenomenology of Levinas, I reconsider this view by suggesting that the experience of effigy pipe smoking constituted a context for intersubjectivity ˜ an emerging of the self through the gaze of the other. I argue that the material presence of the effigy pipe would have established a face-to-face or coextensive corporeality that brought the Iroquoian smoker into contact with a living interlocutor to whom he was ultimately responsible. This sense of responsibility is further explored in connection with broader themes of transcendence and existence as they relate to smoking in Iroquoian culture.