4. Performing America: Featherwork and Affective Politics

This article analyses feather-work as central material in the culture of a German court around 1600. Materials afforded meanings, invited specif ic practices, and thus became agents that “enmeshed” an audience to endorse new social, economic, and political norms. They formed part of an affective culture and habitus, reproduced in similar spaces and atmospheres. Feathers could be part of specif ic emotional styles and embodied practices. Their appreciation intertwined with specif ic collecting and media strategies as well as the encounter of the Americas. Artefacts fostered emotional communication and aimed at affective transformation in performances such as those at the Württemberg court. They strongly appealed to tactile sensory engagement as much as to vision as modes