Making the World Safe for Existence presents an in-depth description of the cult of the saints as practiced in Chignaulta, an Indian community in the central highlands of Mexico. Data gathered over twenty years of field research and the rich interpretations offered allow the reader to explore Chignauteco cosmology as it is revealed in the elaborate rituals held to honor the saints. The primacy the author assigns to the perception and the Indians have of their world and the place of the saints within it reveals the vitality of an indigenous worldview that has endured since the time of the Conquest. Making the World Safe for Existence will interest specialists in Mesoamerican studies, anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists.

This collection of writings is from authors who are either Indians who have tried to make themselves heard, or whites who have tried to hear Indians. The first part of the book emphasizes the practical and includes Isaac Tens's "Career of the Medicine Man." The second section concentrates on the theoretical and contains Benjamin Lee Whorf's "American Indian Model of the Universe" and chapters on Indian metaphysics, among other things. In addition to an introductory essay on the Indian's stance towards reality, the editors have contributed chapters entitled "The Clown's Way" and "An American Indian View of Death."

"This book is a marvelous counterpoint to the rich scholarship that has developed on the 'center' in Southeast Asian societies, providing for the first time an in-depth study of the play of personhood and power--and their historical transformations--on the Indonesian 'periphery.'"--Toby Alice Volkman, Social Science Research Council

"A very important work, not only for the specialists of island Southeast Asia, but also for the general anthropologist. Atkinson accomplishes a number of tasks in fresh and innovative ways."--George E. Marcus, Rice University

"Impressively informed by major theoretical issues, Atkinson's work at the same time brings her readers into the everyday world of the Wana in Sulawesi, Indonesia."--Renato Rosaldo, Stanford University

Tony Swain has prepared a comprehensive bibliographical survey of all substantial publications on Aboriginal religions appearing between 1798 and early 1990. The volume opens with a three-chapter narrative section which provides the historic and analytic contexts for the cataloguing that follows. The 1,076 entries are critically annotated and classified by geography and theme. More specific investigation of selected topics can be pursued through the four indexes which, besides offering an alphabetical listing of all titles and authors, provide access by "tribes and places" and general subjects. The three narrative chapters explore the history of the study of Aboriginal religions, the emergence of key themes in investigating these traditions, and the unique features of the regions which provide the primary classification for the bibliography that follows. Chapter one shows how a succession of theories, conceptions, and blatant prejudices have molded the way writers approached the traditions of the Aborigines. Chapter two examines those themes scholars have felt useful in analyzing Aboriginal religions, placing their emergence in historical perspective and discussing their usefulness as conceptual tools. Finally, the third chapter highlights the unique features of the ten regions used as the primary categories of classification, describing possible historical forces which have shaped their particular forms. This first bibliography of Australian Aboriginal religions is an essential acquisition for all serious academic libraries.

W. Y. Evans-Wentz, great Buddhist scholar and translator of such now familiar works as the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" and the "Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation," spent his final years in California. There, in the shadow of Cuchama, one of the Earth's holiest mountains, he began to explore the astonishing parallels between the spiritual teaching of America's native peoples and that of the deeply mystical Hindus and Tibetans. "Cuchama and Sacred Mountains," a book completed shortly before his death in 1965, is the fruit of those explorations.
To Cuchama, "Exalted High Place," came the young Cochimi and Yuma boys for initiation into the mystic rites for their people. In solitude they sought and received guidance and wisdom. In this same way, the peoples of ancient Greece, the Hebrews, the early Christians, and the Hindus had found access to inner truth on their own holy mountains: and in this same way must the modern person find the path to inner knowing.
Surveying many of the most Sacred Mountains in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, Evans-Wentz expresses the belief that the secret power of these high places has not passed away but only awaits the coming of a New Age. This new age, in accord with the oldest prophecies of our continent, will be a time of renaissance, the long-waited era of harmony and peace among all peoples.
This renaissance shall be uniquely American, a renewal based on the values so long honored by the Americans before Columbus, and so ruthlessly trampled by the "civilized" Europeans who overran them. No other race of people has been as spiritual in their way of life than the original Americans, notes Evans-Wentz. Perhaps none other has known such martyrdom. Yet the secret greatness of the Indian religion still lives, ancient as the Earth itself, yet ageless in its power to renew.

'Hultkrantz treads where other angels fear to with this audacious and clear overall survey. He leaves the room for specialists to debate and generalists to quicken curiosity.'--Christian Century

An overview of the title subject.

"David F. Aberle's book on Navajo peyotism is by far the most comprehensive and complete of any on a North American tribe, and the Navajo nation is the largest in the United States. He discusses the specific politico-economic context and the crisis in the longtime struggle, and traces in detail the conflict of the traditional and the new religion." Weston La Barre. "A sound, scholarly work which has joined the ranks of anthropological classics since its original 1966 publication." American Indian Quarterly. "The chapters attending to the rituals of Peyotism and the contrast between it and Navaho religion are particularly good, though none of the materials can be faulted. Of import are the chapters explicating the Native American Church, Navaho style, in the theoretical context of social movements." Choice. "Today peyotism is a political as well as a religious issue to the Navaho people....A large part of [this] scholarly and impressive contribution is devoted to this aspect....Aberle has not been content to present ritual divorced from philosophy, and his discussion of the underlying though of peyotists is valuable to the student of religions in general....[His] study of the economic aspects of peyotism is closely detailed, and indeed, this book is one of the few publications which present such material in compact form for any North American Indian group." Science.

Just one generation ago, the Sora tribe in India lived in a world populated by the spirits of their dead, who spoke to them through shamans in trance. Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love, anger, and guilt. Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death. How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today's crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments--but also new torments and uncertainties. Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People, this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.

African traditional religion encompasses a variety of non-dogmatic, spiritual practices followed by millions around the world. Some scholars argue it is related to the Nubian religion of Egypt's Dynastic Period. In an expanded second edition, this book examines the nature of African traditional religion and describes common attributes of tribal beliefs, with an emphasis on West Africa. Principal elements studied include sacrifice, salvation and culture, mores of revelation, divination, and African resilience in the face of invasion and colonization. The religious experiences of black people throughout the Americas are also covered. The author finds the cosmology, symbolism and rituals of the Yoruba culture to be the fundamental bases of African traditional religion, and draws similarities between the oral and written literature of West Africans and that of New World practitioners. The influence of Islam and Christianity is also discussed.

The Temiar are a Mon-Khmer-speaking group living in the uplands of northern Peninsular Malaysia. People in the region once practised Mahayana Buddhism and later Islam, but when Geoffrey Benjamin began his fieldwork in 1964, the Temiar practised a localised and unexportable animistic religion. Over a period of nearly 50 years he has followed the Temiar community, witnessing a series of changes that have seen them become ever more embedded in broader Malaysian society. Benjamin's work traces a process of religious enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment, as the Temiars reacted in various ways to Baha'i, Islam and Christianity, including developing their own new religion. In a text enriched by detailed ethnographic reportage, Benjamin draws on the Temiar experience to set out a novel theory of religion, and to explore the changing intellectual framework of anthropology over the past half-century.

A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, the book presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.

While death, eschatology and exotic indigenous deathways have long held a privileged position in the ethnographic and popular literature on Borneo, ancestors have remained a strangely neglected topic. This volume fills this lacuna by presenting a collection of essays on ancestors in Borneo societies written by anthropologists with extensive experience in the field and drawing on new scholarship in kinship and animism studies. Belying the unimportance of ancestors in the literature, the essays document a complex significance of ancestors in Borneo religion and social life. Ancestors appear in a variety of manifestations and contexts, including as guests or distant beneficiaries of offerings in mortuary and community rituals, as village guardians and personal protecting spirits, as assistants in curing rituals and warfare, as unsolicited visitors in dreams and involuntary possession, and as sources of political authority, cultural legitimacy, and collective identity in public discourse. The pattern of relating to ancestors that emerges from this close collaborative effort differs from classic ethnographic representations of ancestor worship based on Sino-African material, and broadens the theoretical and comparative understanding of the subject. Exploring at depth complex questions about the constitution of ancestorship and how ancestral status is established - and the role in this regard of death, kinship, prowess, morality and ritual - this volume will not just be of interest to regional specialists but also will enrich the general anthropological theory of ancestors, kinship and religion.

While death, eschatology and exotic indigenous deathways have long held a privileged position in the ethnographic and popular literature on Borneo, ancestors have remained a strangely neglected topic. This volume fills this lacuna by presenting a collection of essays on ancestors in Borneo societies written by anthropologists with extensive experience in the field and drawing on new scholarship in kinship and animism studies. Belying the unimportance of ancestors in the literature, the essays document a complex significance of ancestors in Borneo religion and social life. Ancestors appear in a variety of manifestations and contexts, including as guests or distant beneficiaries of offerings in mortuary and community rituals, as village guardians and personal protecting spirits, as assistants in curing rituals and warfare, as unsolicited visitors in dreams and involuntary possession, and as sources of political authority, cultural legitimacy, and collective identity in public discourse. The pattern of relating to ancestors that emerges from this close collaborative effort differs from classic ethnographic representations of ancestor worship based on Sino-African material, and broadens the theoretical and comparative understanding of the subject. Exploring at depth complex questions about the constitution of ancestorship and how ancestral status is established - and the role in this regard of death, kinship, prowess, morality and ritual - this volume will not just be of interest to regional specialists but also will enrich the general anthropological theory of ancestors, kinship and religion.

Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora is a multidisciplinary, transregional exploration of Sango religious traditions in West Africa and beyond. Sango the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning is a powerful, fearful deity who controls the forces of nature, but has not received the same attention as other Yoruba orishas. This volume considers the spread of polytheistic religious traditions from West Africa, the mythic Sango, the historical Sango, and syncretic traditions of Sango worship. Readers with an interest in the Yoruba and their religious cultures will find a diverse, complex, and comprehensive portrait of Sango worship in Africa and the African world."

While much theological thinking assumes a normative male perspective, this study demonstrates how our ideas of religious beliefs and practices change in the light of gender awareness. Exploring the philosophy and practices of the Orisha traditions (principally the Afro-Cuban religious complex known as Santeria) as they have developed in the Americas, Clark suggests that, unlike many mainstream religions, these traditions exist within a female-normative system in which all practitioners are expected to take up female gender roles. Examining the practices of divination, initiation, possession trance, sacrifice, and witchcraft in successive chapters, Clark explores the ways in which Santeria beliefs and practices deviate from the historical assumptions about and the conceptual implications of these basic concepts. After tracing the standard definition of each term and describing its place within the worldview of Santeria, Clark teases out its gender implications to argue for the female-normative nature of the religion. By arguing that gender is a fluid concept within Santeria, Clark suggests that the qualities of being female form the ideal of Santeria religious practice for both men and women. In addition, she asserts that the Ifa cult organized around the male-only priesthood of the babalawo is an independent tradition that has been incompletely assimilated into the larger Santeria complex. Based on field research done in several Santeria communities, Clark's study provides a detailed overview of the Santeria and Yoruba traditional beliefs and practices. By clarifying a wide range of feminist- and gender-related themes in Cuban Santeria, she challenges the traditional gendering of thereligion and provides an account that will be of significant interest to students of Caribbean studies and African religions, as well as to scholars in anthropology, sociology, and gender studies.

Jacobi's groundbreaking osteology study uncovers the history of the Tipu Maya of Belize and their subsequent contact with the Spanish conquistadores and missionaries.

Two cultures collided at Tipu, Belize, in the 1600s: that of the native Maya and that of the Spanish missionaries, who arrived with an agenda of religious subjugation and, ultimately, political control. Combining historical documentation with the results of an archaeological exploration of a Tipu cemetery, Keith Jacobi provides an account of the meshing of these two cultures and the assimilation of Catholic practices by the Tipu.

In particular, Jacobi focuses on the dental remains recovered at this site. A tooth may be the last tangible evidence of a living creature, so teeth can reveal information about an individual's health, diet, cosmetic alteration, trauma, and genetic structure. From the genetic structure the researcher can learn information about an individual's relationship to others in a particular population and between populations.

Jacobi's research reveals how these European and Spanish Catholic practices were assimilated by the Tipu Maya and enables the first description of the prevalent attitudes toward death and burial customs. Through this study of Tipu Maya dentition changes through time, Jacobi sheds light on Spanish intermarriage, Maya familial relationships, and the Tipu genetic affinity with other prehistoric, historic, and modern Maya.

In this groundbreaking work, Robert Baum seeks to reconstruct the religious and social history of the Diola communities in southern Senegal during the precolonial era, when the Atlantic slave trade was at its height. Baum shows that Diola community leaders used a complex of religious shrines and priesthoods to regulate and contain the influence of the slave trade. He demonstrates how this close involvement with the traders significantly changed Diola religious life.

Paul B. Steinmetz served as a Catholic priest among the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota from 1961 to 1981. During that time, at the funeral of Rex Long Visitor in 1965, Steinmetz prayed with the Sacred Pipe as an image of Christ. This prayer was the beginning of a thirty-year journey of intellectual discovery for Steinmetz, as he discovered the true meaning of the Sacred Pipe. This book -- a combination of deep religious faith and brilliant analytic acumen -- is the result.

Steinmetz writes that the sacred pipe -- one of the most important ritual objects used by many tribes throughout North America -- can best be understood in the context of Christian theology. Steinmetz presents an extensive ethnography about the sacred pipe and demonstrates how its many associations are really images of Christ.

In order to explicate fully this archetypal synthesis intuited at Rex Long Visitor's funeral, Steinmetz draws heavily on, and critically compares, the works of Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Karl Rahner.

"You shall have no other gods besides Me." This injunction, handed down through Moses three thousand years ago, marks one of the most decisive shifts in Western culture: away from polytheism toward monotheism. Despite the momentous implications of such a turn, the role of idolatry in giving it direction and impetus is little understood. This book examines the meaning and nature of idolatry--and, in doing so, reveals much about the monotheistic tradition that defines itself against this sin.

The authors consider Christianity and Islam, but focus primarily on Judaism. They explore competing claims about the concept of idolatry that emerges in the Hebrew Bible, as a "whoring after false gods." Does such a description, grounded in an analogy of sexual relations, presuppose the actual existence of other gods with whom someone might sin? Or are false gods the product of "men's hands," simply a matter of misguided belief? The authors show how this debate, over idolatry as practice or error, has taken shape and has in turn shaped the course of Western thought--from the differentiation between Jewish and Christian conceptions of God to the distinctions between true and false belief that inform the tradition of religious enlightenment.

Ranging with authority from the Talmud to Maimonides, from Marx to Nietzsche and on to G. E. Moore, this brilliant account of a subject central to our culture also has much to say about metaphor, myth, and the application of philosophical analysis to religious concepts and sensibilities. Its insights into pluralism and intolerance, into the logic and illogic of the arguments religions aim at each other, make "Idolatry" especially timely and valuable inthese days of dark and implacable religious difference.

"'I love the Lord, He heard my cry, ' Deacon cries out as the newly gathered congregation, now seated in their pews, echoes his words in a plaintive tune". Thus begins the Devotional at St. John Progressive Baptist Church, one of many Afro-Baptist services that Walter Pitts observed in the dual role of anthropologist and church pianist. Based on extensive fieldwork in black Baptist churches in rural Texas, this is a major new study of the African origins of African-American forms of worship. Over a period of five years, Pitts, a scholar of anthropology and linguistics, played the piano at and recorded numerous worship services. Offering an extensive history of Afro-Baptist religion in the American South, he compares the ritual structures he observed with those of traditional African worship and other religious rituals of African origin in the New World. Through these historical comparisons, coupled with sociolinguistic analysis, Pitts uncovers striking parallels between Afro-Baptist services and the rituals of Western and Central Africa, as well as African-derived rituals in the United States Sea Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Pitts demonstrates that African and African-American worship share an underlying binary structure: the somber melancholy of the first ritual frame and the joyful, ecstatic trance of the second frame, both essential to the fulfillment of that structure. Of particular interest is his discovery of the way in which the deliberate heightening and strategic suppression of "black English" contribute to this binary structure of worship. This highly original study, with a foreword by Vincent Wimbush, creates a memorable portrait of this vital, yet misunderstood aspectof African-American culture. A model for the investigation of African retentions in the diaspora, Old Ship of Zion will be of keen interest to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, religious studies, and African-American studies, as well as those concerned with the culture of the diaspora, the investigation of syncretism, folklore, and ethnomusicology.

Dry whiskey, Divine herb, Devil's root, Medicine of God, Peyote: for some people, to use it is to hear colors and see sounds. For many Native Americans, it brings an ability to reach out of their physical lives, to communicate with the spirits, and to become complete. For chemists, pharmacologists, and psychiatrists, the plant is fascinating in its complexity and in the ways its chemicals work upon the human mind.What is it in peyote that causes such unusual effects? Can modern medical science learn anything from Native Americans' use of peyote in curing a wide variety of ailments? What is the Native American Church, and how do its members use peyote? Does anyone have the legal right to use drugs or controlled substances in religious ceremonies?Within this volume are answers to these and dozens of other questions surrounding the controversial and remarkable cactus. Greatly expanded and brought up-to-date from the 1980 edition, these pages describe peyote ceremonies and the users' experiences, and also cover the many scientific and legal aspects of using the plant. Well written, informative, comprehensive, and enlightening, the book will be welcomed by counselors, anthropologists, historians, physicians, chemists, lawyers, and observers of the contemporary drug scene, as well as by interested general readers.

According to the Dinka people of the Southern Sudan, man and his creator were originally close together. They became separated, like the earth and sky, when the first man and woman acted with human independence. Dinka religious practice follows from that separation. Divinity and Experience, now reissued for the first time in paperback, has, since its first publication in 1961, acquired the status of a minor classic of social anthropology. In the first section, the various divinities of the Dinka are described with their complex range of meaning and imagery, and related to the Dinka's own experience of the conditions of life and death. They may be interpreted, it is suggested, as images arising out of that experience. The second part discusses the role of the priests, the `masters of the fishing spear', who interested Fraser in his study of divine worship. Sacrifices are described and their meaning analysed, and finally their rites at the death of priests, some of whom may enter the grave alive, are examined. Translations of hymns, prayers, and myths are also provided, which serve as a good introduction to the thought and beliefs of the Dinka for those interested in religion and its interpretation.

Die vorliegende Arbeit moechte zeigen, wie Karl Barth in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit dem Religionsbegriff zu den Thesen 'Religion als Unglaube' und 'die christliche Religion als die einzig wirkliche und wahre Religion' in der Kirchlichen Dogmatik (KD) 17 - Gottes Offenbarung als Aufhebung der Religion -gelangt. Sie beschaftigt sich mit Barths AEusserungen zum Verhaltnis von Religion und Wahrheit im Zeitraum von 1909 bis 1938 und richtet sich auf die konstruktive Rolle von 'Religion' und damit auf die Frage, welche argumentative Rolle und Funktion Barth dem Religionsbegriff zuweist. Daruber hinaus koennte die konstruktive Rolle von 'Religion' in Barths Theologie der zeitgenoessischen Religionswissenschaft eine neue Perspektive eroeffnen.

Die Vorstellungen von den Osmanen schwanken in ihren Nachbarlandern und uberhaupt im Abendland. Eingebettet in eine romanhafte Rahmenhandlung werden Geschichte, Soziologie und Psychologie der Osmanen des 18. Jahrhunderts vor ihrer zunehmenden Verwestlichung im 19. Jahrhundert dargestellt und zeigen ein Selbstverstandnis, das in abgewandelter Form vor allem auch heute noch nachschwingt. Insgesamt vermitteln sie einen verstandnisvolleren Blick in die Entwicklung des Islam.