Cultures meet on unequal terms. No matter how apparently friendly and mutual are the meetings, power is always at play. Knowledge systems, schemes of perception, and grammars of evaluation clash in such encounters. This book also looks at some of these points of contact between cultures—the traditional oralities of the Third World and the literate presumptions of the Western teachers, field researchers, government agents and missionaries. It finds that at these points of contact texts are constructed sometimes for and sometimes by the people who are the supposed inferiors of the masters of the printed page of textualization.
Moreover, this study seeks to show that these points of contact are sore points, and the inflammations and pains back up into the hinterlands of the textualized community. In other words, colonialism—as a textual experience—is not only something that is inflicted upon vulnerable and exploited cultures; it is also something that happens to the masters of the text, and in doing so that "something" transforms their own sense of the book, of literacy, as well.
This study examines these problematics from the perspective of what is known as the History of Mentalities, a discipline which synthesizes not only the history of feelings and institutions, but cultural anthropology, psychohistory and textual theory. In this way, the points of contact under examination are determined less by chronology or geography than by the questions they raise. Indeed, one may very well say that a "third world" of textual awareness is created by these questions, and all who raise such questions are inhabitants of a developing world of thoughts, perceptions and texts.

"My Cow Comes to Haunt Me:" European Explorers, Travellers, and Novelists Constructing Textual Selves and Imagining the Unthinkable in Lands and Islands Beyond the Sea, from Christopher Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt
Norman Simms

"Norman Simms plumbs the collective layer of our inner space by computing the interference patterns generated between settlers and natives. Thus he serves as an introduction to the good that remains of classical psychoanalysis—for it has always been acknowledged that any concrete grasp of psychology has to include the collective ground."
—William Theaux, founder of the Institute of Plural Analysis, executive council member of the Institute for the History of Mentalities
 
 

My Cow Comes to Haunt Me "… offers an immensely sensitive, learned, and creative analysis of extreme clashes of mentalities as evidenced or fancied in sources ranging from explorers' memoirs of the Pacific Islands, through fantasies of the Robinson Crusoe type, to reminiscences by Australian aborigines and Tongan fishermen. In the methodologically sophisticated comparative study of mentalitie, Norman Simms is second to none."
—Rudolph Binion, Leff Families Professor of Modern European History, Brandeis University

Norman Simms earned his first degree at Alfred University and then his MA and PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. After four years at the University of Manitoba in Canada, he moved to New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Waikato since 1970. Thanks to this experience of non-European society and the ability to see a still-functioning set of oral communities, Simms has become acutely aware of the need to test modern critical, cultural and historical theories against the realities of texts generated by the long series of unequeal encounters we call colonialism. Simms has for many years been an editor and publisher in New Zealand, and thus worked intimately with writers in the creation and development of the new literacies he often writes about. He is founder of the journal, Mentalities/Mentalitiés.