Only a few decades after the Spanish conquest of Peru, the third Bishop of Cuzco, Sebastián de Lartaún, called for a report on the religious practices of the Incas. The report was prepared by Cristóbal de Molina, a priest of the Hospital for the Natives of Our Lady of Succor in Cuzco and Preacher General of the city. Molina was an outstanding Quechua speaker, and his advanced language skills allowed him to interview the older indigenous men of Cuzco who were among the last surviving eyewitnesses of the rituals conducted at the height of Inca rule. Thus, Molina's account preserves a crucial first-hand record of Inca religious beliefs and practices.

This volume is the first English translation of Molina's Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas since 1873 and includes the first authoritative scholarly commentary and notes. The work opens with several Inca creation myths and descriptions of the major gods and shrines (huacas). Molina then discusses the most important rituals that occurred in Cuzco during each month of the year, as well as rituals that were not tied to the ceremonial calendar, such as birth rituals, female initiation rites, and marriages. Molina also describes the Capacocha ritual, in which all the shrines of the empire were offered sacrifices, as well as the Taqui Ongoy, a millennial movement that spread across the Andes during the late 1560s in response to growing Spanish domination and accelerated violence against the so-called idolatrous religions of the Andean peoples.

At Ansha's takes the reader inside the spirit mosque of a female healer in Nampula, northern Mozambique. It is here that Ansha, a Makonde spirit healer, heals the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses pieces of her story of affliction and healing, and engages the world outside her mosque. We come to know Ansha’s experiences as revolutionary and migrant, her religious trajectories, family, the healers who cured her, the spirits who possessed her, and her declining health. We follow Ansha’s shifts in her life and work in the mosque as these intersect with the visible and invisible borders of Mozambique and of its fraught history. Confronting events in her life and in the mosque between 2009 and 2016, Ansha invites us to make meaning with her, as we sit in her mosque, and engage with her family, spirits, friends, patients, and world.

Often seen as ethnically monolithic, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in fact successfully pursued evangelism among diverse communities of indigenous peoples and Black Indians. Christina Dickerson-Cousin tells the little-known story of the AME Church’s work in Indian Territory, where African Methodists engaged with people from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) and Black Indians from various ethnic backgrounds. These converts proved receptive to the historically Black church due to its traditions of self-government and resistance to white hegemony, and its strong support of their interests. The ministers, guided by the vision of a racially and ethnically inclusive Methodist institution, believed their denomination the best option for the marginalized people. Dickerson-Cousin also argues that the religious opportunities opened up by the AME Church throughout the West provided another impetus for Black migration.

Insightful and richly detailed, Black Indians and Freedmen illuminates how faith and empathy encouraged the unique interactions between two peoples.

El Monte's New Itineraries is the first book fully devoted to the study of Cuban author and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954), one of the most influential books in Caribbean cultural history. Highly referenced, if understudied, El Monte is a comprehensive work that intertwines ethnobotany, popular orality, and Afro-Cuban traditions. Its pages have enjoyed a transnational influence, enriching domains such as ethnography, politics, theater, and even science fiction literature in the Caribbean, and the knowledge contained in it lies at the heart of Afrodiasporic spirituality and ethnomedicinal practices across Hispanic Caribbean cultures and beyond.

Enchanted Modernities tells the story of an Indigenous community’s work to decolonize and reclaim its collective ancestral identity. In this rich, theoretically informed ethnography, Micah F. Morton follows a transregional network of Indigenous Akha people from Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), China, and Laos as they spearhead a new movement for a pan-Akha identity. In the face of enormous historical and present-day colonialist pressures, this neo-traditionalist movement has focused on revitalizing (or “vitalizing,” in Morton’s suggestive term) Akha ancestral ways, preventing ongoing conversion to Christianity, and facilitating return conversion to the ways of the Ancestors. Morton focuses especially on the community’s work to ensure their Ancestors live on and thus remain a dynamic part of their, and their descendants’, lives.

Although modernity and its colonial legacies are often portrayed as severing or at least attenuating people’s ancestral ties, Enchanted Modernities shows that those ties persist and, in fact, are on the rise. Akha and other Indigenous ancestral and animist resurgences are blossoming despite the paradigmatic Western framing of modernity as fundamentally at odds with Ancestors and, for that matter, kinship and even religion. Morton demonstrates that modernity and modernization proceed alongside the reproduction of new and old forms of enchantment.

Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world.

In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone.

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.

Born in 1947, Ifáyẹmí Ọ̀ṣúndàgbonù Ẹlẹ́buìbọn descends from a long line of Yorùbá healers, philosophers, and priests. A fervent disciple of Ifá from age four, Ẹlẹ́buìbọn grew to become both a living moral exemplar and an internationally recognized face of his religion. The first scholarly work to connect the biography of a devout Ifá practitioner to broader intellectual conversations around pluriversalism and Indigenous knowledge systems, Ifá Priestcraft analyzes the complexities of Yorùbá philosophy and religion and their lasting cultural impact in Nigeria and throughout the diaspora. Toyin Falola, a world-renowned scholar of African studies, employs a phenomenological approach that recognizes and solidifies the voice of the “guru” as an organic and authentic source of knowledge. The result is a wholly original and uniquely interdisciplinary study of Yorùbá spirituality and an extraordinary contribution to the field of ancestral studies.

Víctor Montejo’s story recounts the near-death experience of his grandfather, Antonyo Mekel Lawuxh (Antonio Esteban), who fell gravely ill in Guatemala in the late 1920s but survived to tell his family and community what he had witnessed of the afterlife.

Narrated from Antonio’s perspective, the reader follows along on a journey to the Maya underworld of Xibalba, accompanied by two spirit guides. Antonio traverses Xibalba’s levels of heaven and hell, encountering instructive scenes of punishment and reward: in one chapter, conquistadors are perpetually submerged in a pool of their victims’ blood; in another, the souls of animal abusers are forever unable to cross a crocodile-infested river. Infused with memory, the author illustrates Guatemala’s unique religious syncretism, exploring conceptions of heaven and hell shared between Catholicism and Indigenous Maya spirituality. In the tradition of both the Popol Vuh and the Divine Comedy, Montejo’s narrative challenges easy categorization—this is a work of family history, religious testimony, political allegory, and sacred literature.

Explores the embodiment of religion in the Cahokia land and how places create, make meaningful, and transform practices and beliefs

Cahokia, the largest city of the Mississippian mound cultures, lies outside present-day East St. Louis. Land of Water, City of the Dead reconceptualizes Cahokia’s emergence and expansion (ca. 1050–1200), focusing on understanding a newly imagined religion and complexity through a non-Western lens. Sarah E. Baires argues that this system of beliefs was a dynamic, lived component, based on a broader ontology, with roots in other mound societies. This religion was realized through novel mortuary practices and burial mounds as well as through the careful planning and development of this early city’s urban landscape.

Baires analyzes the organization and alignment of the precinct of downtown Cahokia with a specific focus on the newly discovered and excavated Rattlesnake Causeway and the ridge-top mortuary mounds located along the site axes. Land of Water, City of the Dead also presents new data from the 1954 excavations of the ridge-top mortuary Wilson Mound and a complete analysis of the associated human remains. Through this skeletal analysis, Baires discusses the ways that Cahokians processed and buried their ancestors, identifying unique mortuary practices that include the intentional dismemberment of human bodies and burial with marine shell beads and other materials.

A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice

Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States.

The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

In perhaps as few as one hundred years, the Inka Empire became the largest state ever formed by a native people anywhere in the Americas, dominating the western coast of South America by the early sixteenth century. Because the Inkas had no system of writing, it was left to Spanish and semi-indigenous authors to record the details of the religious rituals that the Inkas believed were vital for consolidating their conquests. Synthesizing these arresting accounts that span three centuries, Thomas Besom presents a wealth of descriptive data on the Inka practices of human sacrifice and mountain worship, supplemented by archaeological evidence.

Of Summits and Sacrifice offers insight into the symbolic connections between landscape and life that underlay Inka religious beliefs. In vivid prose, Besom links significant details, ranging from the reasons for cyclical sacrificial rites to the varieties of mountain deities, producing a uniquely powerful cultural history.

"Williams provides a thought-provoking overview of popular religion in America that will intrigue specialist and student alike. . . . He has both answered many questions and raised important new ones on the nature and development of American popular religion." --Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

"Pioneering. . . . I for one am glad he combined scholarship and chutzpah for this modestly immodest first word." --Catholic Historical Review
 

Based on extensive archival research, The Power of Huacas is the first book to take account of the reciprocal effects of religious colonization as they impacted Andean populations and, simultaneously, dramatically changed the culture and beliefs of Spanish Christians.

Winner, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies, American Academy of Religion, 2015

The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Taking Andean religious specialists—or hechizeros (sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology—as a starting point, she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately changed more than Andean ones.

Religious ceremonies were an inseparable part of Aboriginal traditional life, reinforcing social, economic, and political values. However, missionaries and government officials with ethnocentric attitudes of cultural superiority decreed that Native dances and ceremonies were immoral or un-Christian and an impediment to the integration of the Native population into Canadian society. Beginning in 1885, the Department of Indian Affairs implemented a series of amendments to the Canadian Indian Act, designed to eliminate traditional forms of religious expression and customs, such as the Sun Dance, the Midewiwin, the Sweat Lodge, and giveaway ceremonies.However, the amendments were only partially effective. Aboriginal resistance to the laws took many forms; community leaders challenged the legitimacy of the terms and the manner in which the regulations were implemented, and they altered their ceremonies, the times and locations, the practices, in an attempt both to avoid detection and to placate the agents who enforced the law.Katherine Pettipas views the amendments as part of official support for the destruction of indigenous cultural systems. She presents a critical analysis of the administrative policies and considers the effects of government suppression of traditional religious activities on the whole spectrum of Aboriginal life, focussing on the experiences of the Plains Cree from the mid-1880s to 1951, when the regulations pertaining to religious practices were removed from the Act. She shows how the destructive effects of the legislation are still felt in Aboriginal communities today, and offers insight into current issues of Aboriginal spirituality, including access to and use of religious objects held in museum repositories, protection of sacred lands and sites, and the right to indigenous religious practices in prison.

Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands

Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices.

Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents.

Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas.

Contributors
Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright

 

In Shamanism and Vulnerability on the North and South American Great Plains Kathleen Bolling Lowrey provides an innovative and expansive study of indigenous shamanism and the ways in which it has been misinterpreted and dismissed by white settlers, NGO workers, policymakers, government administrators, and historians and anthropologists. Employing a wide range of theory on masculinity, disability, dependence, domesticity, and popular children’s literature, Lowrey examines the parallels between the cultures and societies of the South American Gran Chaco and those of the North American Great Plains and outlines the kinds of relations that invite suspicion and scrutiny in divergent contexts in the Americas: power and autonomy in the case of Amerindian societies and weakness and dependence in the case of settler societies. She also demonstrates that, where stigmatized or repressed in practice, dependence and power manifest and intersect in unexpected ways in storytelling, fantasy, and myth.
 
The book reveals the various ways in which anthropologists, historians, folklorists, and other writers have often misrepresented indigenous shamanism and revitalization movements by unconsciously projecting ideologies and assumptions derived from modern ‘contract societies’ onto ethnographic and historical realities. Lowrey also provides alternative ways of understanding indigenous American communities and their long histories of interethnic relations with expanding colonial and national states in the Americas. A creative historical and ethnographical reevaluation of the last few decades of scholarship on shamanism, disability, and dependence, Shamanism and Vulnerability on the North and South American Great Plains will be of interest to scholars of North and South American anthropology, indigenous history, American studies, and feminism.
 

For any country that has a large and diverse migrant population, it is a struggle to connect these people to the country’s institutions, including the healthcare system, which can be overwhelming in its complexity. Cultural and language barriers often make it difficult for doctors to fully understand the symptoms of their migrant patients, reach accurate diagnoses, or properly treat their suffering. Thus, medical practitioners must attempt new, innovative practices in order to reach patients where they are and convince them to accept treatment from doctors they don’t totally understand. In France, Serge Bouznah and Catherine Lewertowski have pioneered one such practice—that of transcultural mediation. 
 
Drawn from two decades of their experience with transcultural mediation, Spirits in the Consulting Room tells the stories of eight patients—mainly migrants—and their families. Each chapter focuses on a different patient, and Christelle, Djibril, Moncef, Alhassane, Jacinthe, Amy, Cyril, Alice, and Pierre leap off the page as distinct people with unique situations. Together, these chapters reveal how patients’ comprehension of their symptoms is shaped by their cultural background, while recounting the challenges of translating that into terms the doctors can grasp. 
 
The book shows how trained transcultural mediators can help to redress the power imbalance between doctors and the migrants they treat, providing patients with advocates who respect the authority of their background and experiences and don’t just take the side of the medical professionals. The groundbreaking insights modeled in this book can be applied to any medical situation where doctors and patients find themselves speaking different languages. 
 

Born in 1912, Alice Ahenakew was brought up in a traditional Cree community in north-central Saskatchewan. As a young woman, she married Andrew Ahenakew, a member of the prominent Saskatchewan family, who later became an Anglican clergyman and a prominent healer. Alice Ahenakew's personal reminiscences include stories of her childhood, courtship and marriage, as well as an account of the 1928 influenza epidemic an encounters with a windigo. The centrepiece of this book is the fascinating account of Andrew Ahenakewís bear vision, through which he received healing powers. Written in original Cree text with a full English translation, They Knew both Sides of Medicine also includes an introduction discussing the historical background of the narrative and its style and rhetorical structure, as well as a complete Cree-English glossary.