BiblioVault - Books about Rites and ceremonies

Himalayan Dialogue

Tibetan Lamas & Gurung Shamans In Nepal

Stan Royal Mumford

University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

In the mountain valleys of Nepal, Tibetan communities have long been established through migrations from the North. Because of these migrations over the last few centuries, Tibetan lamaism, as one of the world’s great ritual traditions, can be studied in the Himalayas as a process that emerges through dialogue with the more ancient shamanic tradition which it confronts and criticizes.
Here for the first time is a thorough anthropological study of Tibetan lamaism combining textual analysis with richly contextualized ethnographic data. The rites studied are of the Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In contrast to the textual analyses that have viewed the culture as a finished entity, here we see an unbounded ritual process with unfinished interpretations.
Mumford’s focus is on the “dialogue” taking place between the lamaist and the shamanic regimes, as a historic development occurring between different cultural layers. The study powerfully demonstrates that interrelationships between subsystems within a given cultural matrix over time are critical to an understanding of religion as a cultural process.

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Hittite Local Cults

Michele Cammarosano

SBL Press, 2018

An innovative translation and analysis of Hittite local festivals and of their economic and social dimensions for students and scholars

This English translation of the Hittite cult inventories provides a vivid portrait of the religion, economy, and administration of Bronze Age provincial towns and villages of the Hittite Empire. These texts report the state of local shrines and festivals and document the interplay between the central power and provincial communities on religious affairs. Brief introductions to each text make the volume accessible to students and scholars alike.

Features:

Critical editions of Hittite cult inventories, some of which are edited for the first time, with substantial improvements in readings and interpretations
The first systematic study of the linguistic aspects of Hittite administrative jargon
An up-to-date study of Hittite cult images and iconography of the gods

Michele Cammarosano currently leads a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded project on Hittite cultic administration at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. His research interests focus on cuneiform palaeography and Hittite religion.

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How Lifeworlds Work

Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being

Michael Jackson

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Michael Jackson has spent much of his career elaborating his rich conception of lifeworlds, mining his ethnographic and personal experience for insights into how our subjective and social lives are mutually constituted.

In How Lifeworlds Work, Jackson draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa to highlight the dynamic quality of human relationships and reinvigorate the study of kinship and ritual. How, he asks, do we manage the perpetual process of accommodation between social norms and personal emotions, impulses, and desires? How are these two dimensions of lived reality joined, and how are the dual imperatives of individual expression and collective viability managed? Drawing on the pragmatist tradition, psychology, and phenomenology, Jackson offers an unforgettable, beautifully written account of how we make, unmake, and remake, our lifeworlds.

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Huichol Mythology

Robert M. Zingg; Edited by Jay C. Fikes, Phil C. Weigand, and Acelia García de Weigand

University of Arizona Press, 2004

Best known for their ritual use of peyote, the Huichol people of west-central Mexico carried much of their original belief system into the twentieth century unadulterated by the influence of Christian missionaries. Among the Huichol, reciting myths and performing rituals pleases the ancestors and helps maintain a world in which abundant subsistence and good health are assured.

This volume is a collection of myths recorded by Robert Zingg in 1934 in the village of Tuxpan and is the most comprehensive record of Huichol mythology ever published. Zingg was the first professional anthropologist to study the Huichol, and his generosity toward them and political advocacy on their behalf allowed him to overcome tribal sanctions against divulging secrets to outsiders. He is fondly remembered today by some Huichols who were children when he lived among them. Zingg recognized that the alternation between dry and wet seasons pervades Huichol myth and ritual as it does their subsistence activities, and his arrangement of the texts sheds much light on Huichol tradition. The volume contains both aboriginal myths that attest to the abiding Huichol obligation to serve ancestors who control nature and its processes, and Christian-inspired myths that document the traumatic effect that silver mining and Franciscan missions had on Huichol society.

First published in 1998 in a Spanish-language edition, Huichol Mythology is presented here for the first time in English, with more than 40 original photographs by Zingg accompanying the text. For this volume, the editors provide a meticulous historical account of Huichol society from about 200 A.D. through the colonial era, enabling readers to fully grasp the significance of the myths free of the sensationalized interpretations found in popular accounts of the Huichol. Zingg’s compilation is a landmark work, indispensable to the study of mythology, Mexican Indians, and comparative religion.

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Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation

Indigenous Ritual, Land Conflict, and Sovereignty Claims

Paul M. Liffman

University of Arizona Press, 2011

The Huichol (Wixarika) people claim a vast expanse of Mexico’s western Sierra Madre and northern highlands as a territory called kiekari, which includes parts of the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí. This territory forms the heart of their economic and spiritual lives. But indigenous land struggle is a central fact of Mexican history, and in this fascinating new work Paul Liffman expands our understanding of it. Drawing on contemporary anthropological theory, he explains how Huichols assert their sovereign rights to collectively own the 1,500 square miles they inhabit and to practice rituals across the 35,000 square miles where their access is challenged. Liffman places current access claims in historical perspective, tracing Huichol communities’ long-term efforts to redress the inequitable access to land and other resources that their neighbors and the state have imposed on them.

Liffman writes that “the cultural grounds for territorial claims were what the people I wanted to study wanted me to work on.” Based on six years of collaboration with a land-rights organization, interviews, and participant observation in meetings, ceremonies, and extended stays on remote rancherías, Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation analyzes the sites where people define Huichol territory. The book’s innovative structure echoes Huichols’ own approach to knowledge and examines the nation and state, not just the community. Liffman’s local, regional, and national perspective informs every chapter and expands the toolkit for researchers working with indigenous communities. By describing Huichols’ ceremonially based placemaking to build a theory of “historical territoriality,” he raises provocative questions about what “place” means for native peoples worldwide.

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Hunting the Ethical State

The Benkadi Movement of Côte d'Ivoire

Joseph Hellweg

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In the 1990s a nationwide crime wave overtook Côte d’Ivoire. The Ivoirian police failed to control the situation, so a group of poor, politically marginalized, and mostly Muslim men took on the role of the people’s protectors as part of a movement they called Benkadi. These men were dozos—hunters skilled in ritual sacrifice—and they applied their hunting and occult expertise, along with the ethical principles implicit in both forms of knowledge, to the tracking and capturing of thieves. Meanwhile, as Benkadi emerged, so too did the ethnic, regional, and religious divisions that would culminate in Côte d’Ivoire’s 2002–07 rebellion.

Hunting the Ethical State reveals how dozos worked beyond these divisions to derive their new roles as enforcers of security from their ritual hunting ethos. Much as they used sorcery to shape-shift and outwit game, they now transformed into unofficial police, and their ritual networks became police bureaucracies. Though these Muslim and northern-descended men would later resist the state, Joseph Hellweg demonstrates how they briefly succeeded at making a place for themselves within it. Ultimately, Hellweg interprets Benkadi as a flawed but ingenious and thoroughly modern attempt by non-state actors to reform an African state.

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