Pueblo Religion and the Mesoamerican Connection (original) (raw)
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An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion.
2013
There is an unsettling paradox in the anthropology of religion. Modern understandings of “religion” emerged out of a specifically Western genealogy, and recognizing this, many anthropologists have become deeply suspicious of claims that such understandings can be applied with fidelity to premodern or non-Western contexts. And yet, archaeologists now write about “religion” and “ritual” with greater ease than ever, even though their deeply premodern and fully non-Western objects of study would seem to make the use of these concepts especially fraught. In this probing study, Severin Fowles challenges us to consider just what is at stake in archaeological reconstructions of an enchanted past. Focusing on the Ancestral Pueblo societies of the American Southwest, he provocatively argues that the Pueblos—prior to missionization—did not have a religion at all, but rather something else, something glossed in the indigenous vernacular as “doings.” Fowles then outlines a new archaeology of doings that takes us far beyond the familiar terrain of premodern religion. Advance praise for An Archaeology of Doings: “An Archaeology of Doings… provides a landmark contribution to the archaeology of religion and charts a course through which archaeology might bring its unique insights to the modern world.” — Scott Ortman, Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute “This is a brilliant book which should be read by all anthropologists interested in understanding religion. It is simultaneously a fascinating history of Euro-Pueblo relations, a penetrating critique of our ontological categories, and… a compelling argument that we have never really understood how non-Westerners understand the world.” — John Robb, University of Cambridge “An Archaeology of Doings offers a brilliant reinterpretation of the Northern Tiwa archaeological record… [and] a profound intervention into current interdisciplinary debates around anthropological method, the study of religion, and the problematics of secularism. Fowles shows us how persistent tropes about nonmodern ‘religion’… reinforce secularism’s accounts of its own inevitability, and… he demonstrates the value of indigenous categories, not just as a way out of the scholarly conundrums of ‘religion,’ but as a significant improvement in the way we understand human cultures across time.” — Tisa Wenger, Yale Divinity School
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science
This article explores the historical roots of the concepts and practices that constitute religious culture in the Mesoamerican cultural area. The author proposes a historical perspective to reveal the different social processes, institutions and historical events that have shaped popular religiosity in Mesoamerica. In summary, the article examines the most salient issues of the Mesoamerican religious experience, such as: Maya religion, the Catholic Church during the conquest, the colony and independence, religious syncretism, shamanism, the "cofradía", theology of liberation and the recent influence of the protestant churches.
The Never-Changing and the Ever-Changing: the Evolution of Western Pueblo Ritual
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1997
The evolution of Western Pueblo ritual has long been a focus of ethnographic and archaeological research in the American Southwest. Most of these studies emphasize the continuities between the late prehistoric period and the early historic era and highlight the role of katsina ritual in promoting social harmony or controlling weather and fertility. We suggest that a more complete understanding of ritual change during this time span requires a closer examination of the highly dynamic social landscape of the the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries. In particular, we suggest that the increasing evidence for raiding, conflict, and social opposition must be incorporated into new models of social and ritual change.
Cultural comparisons between the Gran Nayar of West Mexico and the Pueblos of the U.S. Southwest must discover systems of transformation. A satisfactory understanding of this macroregion is served neither by unyielding particularism nor by envisioning a singular unified Greater Northwest Mesoamerica. In past decades the prevailing view was of a U.S. Southwest independent of the cultures to the south. More recently, and in reverse, the position has been that the Anasazi, Mogollon, and Hohokam of the Southwest are mainly extensions of Mesoamerica (Farmer, 2001:124). Here I argue for an analysis of similarities and differences such that the facts of one group will illuminate those of another, in the spirit of Preuss (1998 [1908c]: 267). And as Preuss also said (1911:404), I believe that no other attempt to define culture areas can succeed.
The Postclassic period (AD 900-1521) in Mesoamerica marked an era of significant social change. During this period of time in the American Southwest, Puebloan cultures also engaged in their own major social transformations. A central concern of archaeologists has been to seek connections between these two broad regions and these social changes, whether in material culture or ideology, that help to clarify the nature and extent of long-distance interaction and integration of people in the past. This dissertation primarily examines the rise of two major cultural traditions in Northwest Mexico: the Casas Grandes and Aztatlán cultures. To understand these cultures, and the nature of their social, political, economic, and religious organization, is to enable scholars to understand how social change on a continental scale was intertwined and interrelated. This work argues that the rise of the Aztatlán and Casas Grandes cultures was primarily due to the expansion of a new worldview and an entire system of beliefs and socio-political organization, with local manifestations, that was centered upon the Flower World complex, a cosmological framework that penetrated to the core of every aspect of the life of an individual and the community. The adoption of this religious complex, a veritable world religion centered upon the sun and a floral paradisal realm, was at the heart of nearly every major social change in Northwest Mesoamerica and the American Southwest after AD 900. This belief system continues to play a significant role in social change to the present day. Drawing from the spectrum of academic disciplines, this work reflects a broadly humanistic approach in the comparative study and synthesis of data from archaeology, ancient and contemporary religion and symbolism, literature, arts, and native oral histories. Thus, it is uniquely suited for the goal of reconstructing a balanced social history of past and present culture change in the American Southwest and Mesoamerica. The goal of this research is to construct a new conceptual framework for scholars to obtain a better understanding of the mechanisms by which religious beliefs were transmitted and transformed in the past in local and regional cultural contexts across time and space.
Archaeological analyses of the Pueblo Revolts have emphasized the agency of indigenous leaders in materializing a nativistic cultural revitalization movement. Evidence from refuge pueblos in the northern Rio Grande shows that leaders drew on pre-Hispanic traditions from a variety of culture groups, creating a hybrid religious practice which integrated diverse populations. Evidence that these same leaders were using Catholic ecclesiastical paraphernalia in traditional religious contexts, however, has been downplayed in archaeological discussions of Revolt-era nativism. This paper examines the contexts of these appropriations during and prior to the revolts, and elsewhere in the Spanish colonies. I argue that the multiple indexical properties of the particular objects which were appropriated lend them to reinterpretation as markers of indigenous autonomy, and that “nativism” is more appropriately defined as the consolidation of indigenous identity than the elimination of foreign influence.
The prehispanic Tewa world: Space, time, and becoming in the Pueblo Southwest
2011
Cosmology-the theory, origin, and structure of the universe-underlies and informs thought and human action and manifests in people's material culture. However, the theoretical and methodological tools needed to understand cosmological change over archaeological time scales remains underdeveloped. This dissertation addresses the history of the Pueblo people of the American Southwest, specifically the Tewa of the northern Rio Grande region in modern New Mexico, to identify and explain cosmological change in the context of dramatic social and residential transformation. The Great Drought and resulting abandonment of much of the northern Southwest in the late-1200s acted as a catalyst for a complex reorganization of the Pueblo world as displaced migrant groups interacted with existing communities, including people of the Rio Grande region. I argue that this period of immigration, reorganization, and subsequent population coalescence of disparate people, with different world views and histories, resulted in a unique construction of the cosmos and, eventually, the Tewa identity and history that the Spanish encountered in the late 1500s. The resulting Tewa cosmology recorded in twentieth century ethnography, while heavily influenced by histories of conquest and colonization, is therefore a palimpsest of the memories, identities, and histories of disparate peoples brought together by the events of migration and coalescence. Using data collected from architectural mapping, pottery analysis, ceramic compositional analysis, and dendrochronology, I infer a history of settlement and interaction between and within possibly disparate ancestral Tewa groups in the northern 33 Rio Grande region. I then interpret ritual landscape data with respect to cosmological change, focusing on natural and cultural (shrines and rock art) features immediately adjacent to the village. I argue that new cosmologies were developed through negotiation of worldview between disparate peoples displaced by the mass-depopulation of the northern Southwest. The ethnographic Tewa cosmology has roots in multiple traditions but is innovative and unique in the context of the larger Pueblo world. However, because the majority of the Pueblo world underwent similar residential, social, ritual, and cosmological transformation from A.D. 1275-1600, a Tewa case study has broad implications for the remainder of the Pueblo Southwest. 34 CHAPTER 1-RETURN TO COSMOLOGY. .. the world is under no obligation to conform to the logic by which some people conceive of it.
American Antiquity, 2017
Radiocarbon dates on artifacts from a Puebloan shrine in New Mexico reveal a persistence in ritual practice for some 3,800 years. The dates indicate that the shrine had become an important location for ceremonial observances related to warfare by almost 2000 cal. B.C., coinciding with the time when food production was first practiced in the Southwest. The shrine exhibits continuity of ritual behavior, something that Puebloans may find unsurprising, but also changes in the artifacts deposited that indicate new technology, transformations of belief, and perhaps shifting cultural boundaries. After briefly describing this shrine, we discuss some of the artifacts that were deposited there, in particular atlatl darts and flat curved sticks with longitudinal facial grooves. We argue that both were used in ritual fights and then deposited in the shrine as offerings, establishing a behavioral tradition that set the precedent for ethnographic recognition of the site as an important war shrine...