Download or read book The Entablo Manuscript written by Sarah Bennison and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique study of an Andean community’s water rituals and the extraordinary document describing how they should be performed In the dry season in the Andes, water from springs, lakes, reservoirs, and melting glaciers feeds irrigation canals that have sustained communities for thousands of years. Managing and maintaining these water infrastructures is essential, and in 1921, in the village of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, local authorities recorded their ritual canal-cleaning duties in a Spanish-language document called the Entablo. It is only the second book (along with the Huarochirí Manuscript) ever seen by scholars in which an Andean community explains its customs and ritual laws in its own words. Sarah Bennison offers a critical introduction to the Entablo, a Spanish transcription of the document, and an English translation. Among its other revelations, the Entablo delves into the use of khipu boards, devices that meld the traditional knotted strings known as khipus with a written alphabet. Only in the Entablo do we learn that there were multiple khipu boards associated with a single canal-cleaning ritual, or that there were separate khipu records for men and women. The Entablo manuscript furnishes unparalleled insights into Andean rituals, religion, and community history at a historical moment when rural highland communities were changing rapidly.
Download or read book The Entablo Manuscript written by Sarah Bennison and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Andes are a dry region. Water from melting glaciers, however, forms rivers and lakes that feed irrigation canals that have sustained communities for thousands of years. Managing and maintaining these water resources, then, is essential, and it is not surprising that the attendant responsibilities are grounded in religion. In 1921, in the village of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, when some folks were shirking their responsibilities (and claiming there was nothing written down to hold them accountable), local authorities detailed their duties in a Spanish-language document called the Entablo. This project consists of a critical introduction to the Entablo, a diplomatic transcription of the Spanish language manuscript, and an annotated English translation. The Entablo offers a wealth of insight into local rituals, religion, and community history, especially at an historical moment when these communities were changing rapidly. One of the unique aspects of the Entablo is that it provides instructions for the use of khipu boards, devices that meld the traditional khipus with a written alphabet"--
Download or read book Rethinking Relations and Animism written by Miguel Astor-Aguilera and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personhood and relationality have re-animated debate in and between many disciplines. We are in the midst of a simultaneous "ontological turn", a "(re)turn to things" and a "relational turn", and also debating a "new animism". It is increasingly recognised that the boundaries between the "natural" and "social" sciences are of heuristic value but might not adequately describe reality of a multi-species world. Following rich and provocative dialogues between ethnologists and Indigenous experts, relations between the received knowledge of Western Modernity and that of people who dwell and move within different ontologies have shifted. Reflection on human relations with the larger-than-human world can no longer rely on the outdated assumption that "nature" and "cultures" already accurately describe the lineaments of reality. The chapters in this volume advance debates about relations between humans and things, between scholars and others, and between Modern and Indigenous ontologies. They consider how terms in diverse communities might hinder or help express, evidence and explore improved ways of knowing and being in the world. Contributors to this volume bring different perspectives and approaches to bear on questions about animism, personhood, materiality, and relationality. They include anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and scholars of religion.
Download or read book Religious Conflict in Brazil written by Erika Helgen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how Brazilian Catholics and Protestants confronted one of the greatest shocks to the Latin American religious system in its 500-year history This innovative study explores the transition in Brazil from a hegemonically Catholic society to a religiously pluralistic society. With sensitivity, Erika Helgen shows that the rise of religious pluralism was fraught with conflict and violence, as Catholic bishops, priests, and friars organized intense campaigns against Protestantism. These episodes of religious violence were not isolated outbursts of reactionary rage, but rather formed part of a longer process through which religious groups articulated their vision for Brazil’s national future.
Download or read book The Huarochiri Manuscript written by Frank Salomon and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the great repositories of a people's world view and religious beliefs, the Huarochirí Manuscript may bear comparison with such civilization-defining works as Gilgamesh, the Popul Vuh, and the Sagas. This translation by Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste marks the first time the Huarochirí Manuscript has been translated into English, making it available to English-speaking students of Andean culture and world mythology and religions. The Huarochirí Manuscript holds a summation of native Andean religious tradition and an image of the superhuman and human world as imagined around A.D. 1600. The tellers were provincial Indians dwelling on the west Andean slopes near Lima, Peru, aware of the Incas but rooted in peasant, rather than imperial, culture. The manuscript is thought to have been compiled at the behest of Father Francisco de Avila, the notorious "extirpator of idolatries." Yet it expresses Andean religious ideas largely from within Andean categories of thought, making it an unparalleled source for the prehispanic and early colonial myths, ritual practices, and historic self-image of the native Andeans. Prepared especially for the general reader, this edition of the Huarochirí Manuscript contains an introduction, index, and notes designed to help the novice understand the culture and history of the Huarochirí-area society. For the benefit of specialist readers, the Quechua text is also supplied.
Download or read book Walking to Magdalena written by Seth Schermerhorn and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Walking to Magdalena, Seth Schermerhorn explores a question that is central to the interface of religious studies and Native American and indigenous studies: What have Native peoples made of Christianity? By focusing on the annual pilgrimage of the Tohono O'odham to Magdalena in Sonora, Mexico, Schermerhorn examines how these indigenous people of southern Arizona have made Christianity their own. This walk serves as the entry point for larger questions about what the Tohono O'odham have made of Christianity. With scholarly rigor and passionate empathy, Schermerhorn offers a deep understanding of Tohono O'odham Christian traditions as practiced in everyday life and in the words of the O'odham themselves. The author's rich ethnographic description and analyses are also drawn from his experiences accompanying a group of O'odham walkers on their pilgrimage to Saint Francis in Magdalena. For many years scholars have agreed that the journey to Magdalena is the largest and most significant event in the annual cycle of Tohono O'odham Christianity. Never before, however, has it been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry. Walking to Magdalena offers insight into religious life and expressive culture, relying on extensive field study, videotaped and transcribed oral histories of the O'odham, and archival research. The book illuminates indigenous theories of personhood and place in the everyday life, narratives, songs, and material culture of the Tohono O'odham.
Download or read book Andean Cosmopolitans written by José Carlos de la Puente Luna and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Spanish victories over the Inca claimed Tawantinsuyu for Charles V in the 1530s, native Andeans undertook a series of perilous trips from Peru to the royal court in Spain. Ranging from an indigenous commoner entrusted with delivering birds of prey for courtly entertainment to an Inca prince who spent his days amid titles, pensions, and other royal favors, these sojourners were both exceptional and paradigmatic. Together, they shared a conviction that the sovereign's absolute authority would guarantee that justice would be done and service would receive its due reward. As they negotiated their claims with imperial officials, Amerindian peoples helped forge the connections that sustained the expanding Habsburg realm's imaginary and gave the modern global age its defining character. Andean Cosmopolitans recovers these travelers' dramatic experiences, while simultaneously highlighting their profound influences on the making and remaking of the colonial world. While Spain's American possessions became Spanish in many ways, the Andean travelers (in their cosmopolitan lives and journeys) also helped to shape Spain in the image and likeness of Peru. De la Puente brings remarkable insights to a narrative showing how previously unknown peoples and ideas created new power structures and institutions, as well as novel ways of being urban, Indian, elite, and subject. As indigenous people articulated and defended their own views regarding the legal and political character of the "Republic of the Indians," they became state-builders of a special kind, cocreating the colonial order.
Download or read book African Science written by Douglas J. Falen and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sensitive investigation into Benin's occult world, in which magic, science, and the Vodun religion converge into a single universal force. Falen demonstrates how a deep engagement with another lived reality opens our minds and contributes to understanding across cultural difference.
Download or read book Cyborg Theology written by Scott A. Midson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In particular, Donna Haraway argued in her famous 1991 'Cyborg Manifesto' that people, since they are so often now detached and separated from nature, have themselves evolved into cyborgs. This striking idea has had considerable influence within critical theory, cultural studies and even science fiction (where it has surfaced, for example, in the Terminator films and in the Borg of the Star Trek franchise). But it is a notion that has had much less currency in theology. In his innovative new book, Scott Midson boldly argues that the deeper nuances of Haraway's and the cyborg idea can similarly rejuvenate theology, mythology and anthropology. Challenging the damaging anthropocentrism directed towards nature and the non-human in our society, the author reveals - through an imaginative reading of the myth of Eden - how it is now possible for humanity to be at one with the natural world even as it vigorously pursues novel, 'post-human', technologies.
Download or read book Spirits of Blood Spirits of Breath written by Barbara Alice Mann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither half of the cosmos can exist without its twin. Both halves are, therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth" but this erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Alice Mann rescues the authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as possible to their earliest versions and sources, and Indian records, including pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann respects each Indigenous culture as a discrete unit, rather than generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical, linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists alike a window into the purportedly lost, and often caricatured, world of Indigenous American thought.
Download or read book Living Mantra written by Mani Rao and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living Mantra is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners. In ancient Indian doctrine and legends, mantras perceived by rishis (seers) invoke deities and have transformative powers. Adopting a methodology that combines scholarship and practice, Mani Rao discovers a continuing tradition of visionaries (rishis/seers) and revelations in south India’s Andhra-Telangana. Both deeply researched and replete with fascinating narratives, the book reformulates the poetics of mantra-practice as it probes practical questions. Can one know if a vision is real or imagined? Is vision visual? Are deity-visions mediated by culture? If mantras are effective, what is the role of devotion? Are mantras language? Living Mantra interrogates not only theoretical questions, but also those a practitioner would ask: how does one choose a deity, for example, or what might bind one to a guru? Rao breaks fresh ground in redirecting attention to the moments that precede systematization and canon-formation, showing how authoritative sources are formed.
Download or read book Kiowa Belief and Ritual written by Benjamin R. Kracht and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-09 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Kracht's Kiowa Belief and Ritual, a collection of materials gleaned from Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field notes and augmented by Alice Marriott's field notes, significantly enhances the existing literature concerning Plains religions.
Download or read book Shinto Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan written by Aike P. Rots and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan is the first systematic study of Shinto's environmental turn. The book traces the development in recent decades of the idea of Shinto as an 'ancient nature religion,' and a resource for overcoming environmental problems. The volume shows how these ideas gradually achieved popularity among scientists, priests, Shinto-related new religious movements and, eventually, the conservative shrine establishment. Aike P. Rots argues that central to this development is the notion of chinju no mori: the sacred groves surrounding many Shinto shrines. Although initially used to refer to remaining areas of primary or secondary forest, today the term has come to be extended to any sort of shrine land, signifying not only historical and ecological continuity but also abstract values such as community spirit, patriotism and traditional culture. The book shows how Shinto's environmental turn has also provided legitimacy internationally: influenced by the global discourse on religion and ecology, in recent years the Shinto establishment has actively engaged with international organizations devoted to the conservation of sacred sites. Shinto sacred forests thus carry significance locally as well as nationally and internationally, and figure prominently in attempts to reposition Shinto in the centre of public space.
Download or read book The Rastafari Movement written by Michael Barnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rastafari Movement: A North American and Caribbean Perspective provides a historical and ideological overview of the Rastafari movement in the context of its early beginnings in the island of Jamaica and its eventual establishment in other geographic locations. Building on previous scholarship and the author's own fieldwork, the text goes on to provide a rich comparative analysis of the Rastafari movement with other Black theological movements, specifically the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites in the context of the United States. The text explores the following topics: • Pan-Africanism, Black nationalism and Rastafari; • gender dynamics; • globalization; • concepts and symbols; • other Black theological movements. This text is ideal for students of religious studies, sociology, anthropology, African Diaspora studies, African American studies, and Black studies who wish to gain an understanding of the history and beliefs of the Rastafari Movement.
Download or read book Christianity and the Limits of Materiality written by Minna Opas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the fact that Christianity is understood to be thoroughly intertwined with matter, objects, and things, Christians struggle to cope with this materiality in their daily lives. This volume argues that the ambivalent relationships many Christians have with materiality is a driving force that contributes to the way people in different Christian traditions and in different parts of the world understand and live out their religion. By placing the questions of limits and boundary-work to the fore, the volume addresses the question of exactly how Christianity takes place materially, addressing a gap in studies to date. Christianity and the Limits of Materiality presents ground-breaking research on the frameworks and contexts in relation to and within which Christian logics of materiality operate. The volume places the negotiations at the limits of materiality within the larger framework of Christian identities and politics of belonging. The chapters discuss case studies from North and South America, Europe, and Africa, and demonstrate that the limits preoccupying Christians delimit their lives but also enable many things. Ultimately, Christianity and the Limits of Materiality demonstrates that it is at the interfaces of materiality and the transcendent that Christians create and legitimise their religion.
Download or read book Invisible Reality written by Rosalyn R. LaPier and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 John C. Ewers Book Award Winner of the 2018 Donald Fixico Book Award Rosalyn R. LaPier demonstrates that Blackfeet history is incomplete without an understanding of the Blackfeet people’s relationship and mode of interaction with the “invisible reality” of the supernatural world. Religious beliefs provided the Blackfeet with continuity through privations and changing times. The stories they passed to new generations and outsiders reveal the fundamental philosophy of Blackfeet existence, namely, the belief that they could alter, change, or control nature to suit their needs and that they were able to do so with the assistance of supernatural allies. The Blackfeet did not believe they had to adapt to nature. They made nature adapt. Their relationship with the supernatural provided the Blackfeet with stability and made predictable the seeming unpredictability of the natural world in which they lived. In Invisible Reality LaPier presents an unconventional, creative, and innovative history that blends extensive archival research, vignettes of family stories, and traditional knowledge learned from elders along with personal reflections on her own journey learning Blackfeet stories. The result is a nuanced look at the history of the Blackfeet and their relationship with the natural world.
Download or read book The Value of Comparison written by Peter van der Veer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.
